Tinkercad Design Project – Megan, Nic, & Sharon

Project Members: Sharon Din, Nic Maoury, Megan Tabelon

Initial Design:

For our project, we have decided to design a zoetrope. What is a zoetrope? It is an early animation device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive action. The cylinder of many zoetropes are made of paper or cardboard so we thought 3D printing a cylinder would produce a longer lasting and sturdier item.

So far, we have made a design of the cylinder and a cone base that it will spin upon. The design has evenly spaced slits that the user looks through to see a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion. The zoetrope base can either be used with 2D images by inserting a band of sequences images along the bottom sides or a plate with 3D printed sequenced figures can be inserted to sit on top of the bottom plate.

via GIPHY

This is an example of a 2D zoetrope

This is the model of our zoetrope base and it can be found on Tinkercad.

First Draft Print:

Upon printing our first design, we came to the realization it was too small.

Thus, we need to print a larger version of the base. We also had our simplified version of our pivot/holder, so it was quite hard to stay balanced.

We believe that creating a lazy Susan/spinning mechanism will best suit our design. We also need a plate built into the zoetrope that contains 3D graphics when spun. In our case, we decided to do an alligator popping out of the water.

Iterating the Design:

We printed our plate and found that it was still too large. We sized down the plate and also decided to bring back a design of Nic’s, a Tinkercad gnome, into the design of the next plate.
           

Final Design:

This is our final design for the Tinkercad Project: The Zoetrope. The group designed a functioning zoetrope that was bigger than the first draft design. Instead of doing an alligator, we decided to do a growing gnome that gets larger as the zoetrope spins. The five objects were all printed separately and were put together. We also added marbles to our design to create a functioning lazy susan spinning mechanism to get the zoetrope to move easily. At first we printed the plate with a lego but found it to be too big for the zoetrope. The next plate was a little smaller and fit perfectly into the zoetrope but would get stuck so we sanded it down to make it easier to take out. We then painted the plate and other parts to make it look a little nicer. All in all we are very proud and excited to share our zoetrope final product.
         

Our zoetrope on Thingiverse.