We wanted to combine the rainbow paper spinner toy with an arrangement of mirrors like a mirror maze for this project. The light reflected by the mirrors and the shadow cast by both paper structures and mirrors end up becoming part of the visual effect.
Rebecca created CAD models for the base of the structures and created designs for the mirror cut outs for laser cutting. One of the printed parts wasn’t printed right due to soluble support not sticking to the printing bed, so we ended up substituting that with a cardboard base. The mirror cutouts were hot glued into a circle, and we created four of these. Two of them have pedals to look like flowers.
Doris found this rainbow paper spinner toy video, where the paper toy twists and twirls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O89GGuGnZQ) when it’s spinning really fast. We did not get to make the same effect on the testbed because we didn’t figure out how to make the stepper motors to speed up much. However, we did explore different movement patterns of the stepper motor – changing the frequency and dampening can make the wheels “wiggle”, and the paper structure bounces along with that movement.
We also experimented with sound using the midi pad. Doris added some sound effects to few pads. Not sure how to make python play sound simultaneously though. Can try threading in the future.