Overview
Main description
A unique guide to practical mechanical design principles and their applications
In Making Things Move, you’ll learn how to build moving mechanisms through non-technical explanations, examples, and do-it-yourself projects--from art installations to toys to labor-saving devices. The projects include a drawing machine, a mini wind turbine, a mobile robot, and more, but the applications of the examples are limited only by your imagination. A breadth of topics is covered ranging from how to attach couplers and shafts to a motor, to converting between rotary and linear motion.
Each chapter features photographs, drawings, cross sections, and 3D models of the components and systems involved. Emphasis is placed on using off-the-shelf components whenever possible, and most projects also use readily available metals, plastics, wood, and cardboard, as well as accessible fabrication techniques such as laser cutting. Small projects in each chapter are designed to engage you in applying the material in the chapter at hand. Later in the book, more involved projects incorporate material from several chapters.
Making Things Move:
- Focuses on practical applications and results, not abstract engineering theories
- Contains more than a dozen topic-focused projects and four large-scale projects incorporating lessons from the whole book
- Features shopping lists and guides to off-the-shelf components for the projects
- Incorporates discussions of new fabrication techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing, and how you can gain access
- Includes online component for continuing education with author’s website
Hands-on coverage of moving mechanisms
Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines; Materials and Where to Find Them; Screwed or Glued? On Fastening and Joining Parts; Forces, Friction and Torque (Oh My); Mechanical and Electrical Power, Work, and Energy; Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Motor? - Creating and Controlling Motion; The Guts: Bearings, Bushings. Couplers, and Gears; Rotary vs. Linear Motion; Automatons and Mechanical Toys; Making Things and Getting Them Made; Projects
Table of contents
1 Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines
2 Materials and Where to Find Them
3 Screwed or Glued? On Fastening and Joining Parts
4 Forces, Friction and Torque (Oh My)
5 Mechanical and Electrical Power, Work, and Energy
6 Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Motor? - Creating and Controlling Motion
7 The Guts: Bearings, Bushings, Couplers, and Gears
8 Combining Simple Machines for Fun and Work
9 Making Things and Getting Them Made
10 Projects
Appendix
Author comments
Dustyn Roberts is a mechanical engineer, teacher, and author. She started her career at Honeybee Robotics as a design engineer on a project for NASA’s MSL mission, scheduled for launch in 2011. After consulting with James Powderly and Michelle Kempner during their residency at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in 2006, she founded Dustyn Robots and continues to engage in consulting work ranging from gait analysis to designing guided parachute systems. In 2007 she developed a course for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) entitled Mechanisms and Things That Move that is in its fourth year (see class website at: www.itp.nyu.edu/mechanisms). Dustyn was awarded a residency and grant from Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in March 2010 to support development of a book based on this class: Making Things Move (see the companion website at: www.makingthingsmove.com). Dustyn holds a BS in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University with minors in Robotics and Business, and an MS in Biomechanics & Movement Science from the University of Delaware.
