Process (Wearable Meditation)

Abby Park
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Often times, stressed caused by everyday bustle can be overwhelming and sometimes inescapable. My project serves as a wearable meditation device that offers stress relief for those around the wearer. Initially, I was going to create a device that could isolate the wearer in busy crowds in order to allow them a breif respite from all the surrounding activity. I was inspired by feather collars that are often seen on runways, but I could not figure out the mechanics of how the device would raise and lower in my first prototype. The first prototype would serve the same purpose as jewelry for the wearer, but it would not benefit anyone else, except for maybe a momentary distraction. I did not complete any other complete prototypes until my final version, so I mainly worker on the mechanics and design. First, I recreated the shapes from the deep-breathing gif using popsicle sticks and screws. Using this model, I considered all my options to create the blooming motion that I found so appealing about the gif. The first option I considered was shape-memory alloy. However, after attempting to 'program' the alloy, I realized that it could not hold the more defined angles that my design required. My next option was servos. I didn't want to use 30 servos (the number of joints in my design), so I tried to figure out a way to unfold the shapes using only one servo per shape. This prooved to be very difficult and time consuming, so I moved on to my third and final option: gears. Since I wanted my device to unfold in the same manner as the gif, I wanted the triangle to come up first and the heptagon to come up last, but I only wanted to use one motor. Using gear ratios, I was able to manipulate the motor's motion to bring up the triangle first but still have it reach its peak at the same time as the heptagon in the back. Once I designed and lasercut the gears, I encountered the challenge of having them turn without getting caught or disconnecting. So I 3D printed the smaller gears as one piece and separated the larger gears with acrylic pieces to reduce friction. Since the extensions would only be rotating from the bottom corners, I designed the extensions in Rhino to be more attractive since they would be the more passive aspect of the device.