3D Printed Zoetrope

January 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Normally, 29 men walking around in an endless circle would be the stuff of an [M.C. Escher] engraving. [Tobias] turned this into a reality with a little help from some LEDs and a 3D printer.

Like his earlier project, [Tobias] built himself a nice little strobing zoetrope that maintains the illusion of movement by flashing LEDs at precise intervals. Instead of a flat 2D image, [Tobias] went for a walking 3D figure that marches to the beat of a timer circuit. The figures themselves were printed via Shapeways.

The electronics were improved for this iteration. Formerly, [Tobias] used a 555 and a whole bunch of auxiliary components. The circuit was improved for this version to uses Schmitt triggers and an optical encoder. The easy-to-build-on-perfboard schematics and layouts are available, so feel free to build one for yourself.

[Tobias]’ zoetrope isn’t much different from the gigantic Charon sculpture seen at last year’s Burning Man. Sure, it’s not 40 feet tall but it’s still a nice piece of work.

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Building A Zoetrope Using Kinect, Processing, And A Laser Cutter

March 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

A zoetrope is a device that contains a disk full with a series of images that make up and animation. A couple of different methods can be used to trick the eye into seeing a single animated image. In the past this was done by placing the images inside of a cylinder with slits at regular distances. When spun quickly, the slits appear to be stationary, with the images creating the animation. But the same effect can be accomplished using a strobe light.

The disk you see above uses the strobe method, but it’s design and construction is what caught our eye. The animated shapes were captured with a Kinect and isolated using Processing. [Greg Borenstein] takes a depth movie recorded while someone danced in front of a Kinect. He ran it through a Processing sketch and was able to isolate a set of slides that where then turned into the objects seen above using a laser cutter.

You can watch a video of this particular zoetrope after the break. But we’ve also embedded the Pixal 3D zoetrope clip which, although unrelated to this hack, is extremely interesting. Don’t have a laser cutter to try this out yourself? You could always build a zoetrope that uses a printed disk.

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partially finished print, with the embedded animation

Flip Book Animations On The Inside Of 3D Prints

May 4, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 5 Comments

We’ve all seen 3D printed zoetropes, and drawn flip book animations in the corner of notebooks. The shifting, fluid shape of the layers forming on a 3D printer is satisfying. And we all know the joy of hidden, nested objects.

Hackaday alumnus [Caleb Kraft] has a few art pieces that all reflect all these. He’s been making animations by recording a 3D printer. The interesting bit is that his print is made of two objects. An outer one with normal infill that gives a solid form, and a layer cake like inner one with solid infill. It’s documented in this video on YouTube.

There are lots of things to get right. The outer object needs to print without supports. The thickness of the “layer cake” layers determines the frame rate. I had to wonder how he triggered the shutter when the head wasn’t in the way.

His first, experimental, piece is the classic ‘bouncing ball’ animation, inside a ball, and his mature piece is Eadward Muybridge’s “The Horse, In Motion” inside a movie camera.

We’ve covered [Caleb Kraft] before, of course. His Moon On A Budget piece is wonderful. And we’ve covered a number of 3D printer animations. and 3D zoetropes. We particularly were drawn to this one.

Thanks [jmc] for the tip!

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A New Spin On 360 Degree Displays

July 21, 2021 by Michael Shaub 20 Comments

Back in 2018, [Salah] created a prototype display that seems to defy logic using little more than a Pringles can and a fast motor. While not volumetric, this hack does show the same 2D image from any vantage point in 360 degrees around it.

How can cardboard create this effect? Somewhat like a zoetrope uses slits to create a shutter effect, this display uses a thin slit to limit the view of the image within to one narrow vertical slice at a time. When moving fast enough, Persistence of Vision kicks in to assemble these slices into a complete image. What we think is so cool about this hack is that the effect is the same from any angle and by multiple viewers simultaneously.

The project page and video demonstration after the break are light on details, though the idea is so simple as to not require additional explanation. We assume the bright LED seen in the video below was added to overcome the relatively dim appearance of the image when viewed through the narrow slit and isn’t strictly required.

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Serial Silicone Molding

March 26, 2021 by Chris Lott 5 Comments

The techniques for making single-digit quantities of custom molded parts don’t scale well when you need to make dozens, as [Kevin Holmes] discovered. He needed to make 80-some sets of a silicone motor mount, and the one-up mold process was not going to work. He explores several solutions, which he rejects as being too complicated. Finally [Kevin] comes up with the idea of daisy-chaining banks of molds clamped together with rails of stock metal bars. It’s a pretty nifty process to watch and you can check the video out below, which is not unlike a very slow 7495 four-bit shift register.

Even though the silicone he uses is clear, pay attention and you can still see the carry-out as it propagates from mold to mold. He manually performs the nibble carry operation from one bank to the next — we wonder if he could cascade these banks, and inject all 80 in one really big squeeze?

Why would someone need 80 sets of silicone rubber motor mounts, you may ask? Well, you may remember the 4-mation 3D zoetrope that we wrote about back in 2018. [Kevin] is one of the founders of this mesmerizing project, and it would seem that their Kickstarter project has been successful. As he demonstrates in the video below, without some type of noise dampening mounts, a rumble from the motor is amplified through the stage of the zoetrope. If you have any favorite mold-making tips for small batch manufacturing, let us know in the comments below. Thanks to [George Graves] for sending this tip our way.

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Motor-Driven Movement Modernizes POV Toy

February 24, 2021 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Just as we are driven today to watch gifs that get better with every loop, people 100+ years ago entertained themselves with various persistence of vision toys that used the power of optical illusions to make still images come to life. [jollifactory] recently recreated one of the first POV devices — the phenakistoscope — into a toy for our times.

The original phenakistoscopes were simple, but the effect they achieved was utterly amazing. Essentially a picture disk with a handle, the user would hold the handle with one hand and spin the disk with the other while looking in a mirror through slits in the disk. Unlike the phenakistoscopes of yore that could only be viewed by one person at a time, this one allows for group watching.

Here’s how it works: an Arduino Nano spins a BLDC motor from an old CD-ROM drive, and two strips of strobing LEDs provide the shutter effect needed to make the pictures look like a moving image.The motor speed is both variable and reversible so the animations can run in both directions.

To make the disks themselves, [jollifactory] printed some original phenakistiscopic artwork and adhered each one to a CD that conveniently snaps onto the motor spindle. Not all of the artwork looks good with a big hole in the middle, so [jollifactory] created a reusable base disk with an anti-slip mat on top to spin those.

If you just want to watch the thing in action, check out the first video below that is all demonstration. There be strobing lights ahead, so consider yourself warned. The second and third videos show [jollifactory] soldering up the custom PCB and building the acrylic stand.

There are plenty of modern ways to build old-fashioned POV toys, from all-digital to all-printable.

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Flipbook Automation Saves Your Thumb

December 4, 2020 by Al Williams 3 Comments

You’ve probably seen a flipbook. That’s a book with pictures on each page. Each picture is slightly different than the last one so if you flip rapidly through the book you get a little animation. We like the German word, Daumenkino, which translates as “thumb cinema” and that seems appropriate. [Barqunics] put a decidedly new twist on this old technology. His flipbook senses a viewer and automatically flips the pages using a motor. You can see the Arduino-controlled device in the video below.

The presence detection is a ubiquitous sonar sensor. The frame is easy to make since it uses cardboard and hot glue. A DC motor like you find on many toy cars or robots provides the rotation. No 3D printing needed, but we did think it would be easy to 3D-print or laser-cut the pieces.

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