Konstantino K's Paper & Motors: Chaos Box

Update: Above is the second iteration of the "Chaos Box." The original post and documentation can still be found below.

There's often a degree of complexity in my thinking when faced with such a broad restraint as this Paper & Motors project. In the early planning stages I thought more about the mechanics of how a motor works and how its rotating motion can be converted rather than clear concepts. Needless to say, this slowed down the entire process quite a bit.

Once my mind was wrapped around the technical side of things, I thought of creating a kinetic board of "pixels." I would have multicoloured squares of paper lined up together in a grid and they would individually move up and down at different times, creating a sort of "wave of pixels." There were some challenges in planning this: the most obvious approach would be to get some sort of motor-based push and pull system for every individual rectangle. That would be time consuming and expensive. The other challenge was actually converting a rotating motion to a predictable up and down pattern.

Although I stayed locked on that idea for a while I eventually scrapped in and went back to the basics. A motor is used to make things rotate primarily, so I formed a new idea around the concept of a fan. A fan would be entrapped inside an enclosed box with confetti. The top of the box would be transparent so you could see inside, and the fan would blow the confetti around wildly. I've since dubbed it the "chaos box."

As you can see in the picture, the concept is relatively simple: a fan sits inside a wall of the box, confetti (cut up strips of construction paper) sit on the inside, and a hole is cut at the top of the box (filled in with saran wrap). You might also notice that the box seems shoddily constructed and taped together -- I'll explain this later.

I decided to add in some theory to the concept as well, drawing out a 26-space grid (really 25 with one box divided in half) on the floor of the box. In each of the spaces was a letter of the alphabet from A to Z. The idea was that the confetti (really just small pieces of paper) would land on the spaces of the grid and "write" like an Ouija board. My thinking was that it is common to write on paper, but what if paper were to write on itself? There was some issues with this concept, however. Once implemented, there were quite a few pieces of confetti (100 - 200 bits) needed to get the piece to function well, which made it difficult to really have the confetti land on distinct letters. It was easy for many bits to bunch up on one letter, and in general there was no sort of clear "communication" happening.

To comment on some of the flaws of the piece, I constructed the box out of bristol board which may have been one problem early on. The box has the potential to be strong, but having the relatively heavy motor sit inside one of the walls is certainly not structurally sound. The first step to making this work better might be to build the box out of stronger paper material, or perhaps to create some sort of mount more appropriate for the weight of the motor.

The next issue lies in the fan and its relationship to the confetti. I constructed the fan out of one solid piece of bristol board as well, measuring 45 degree angles to distance each blade. Once cut out I bent in each blade so that they would push the air forward. To keep the blades on the motor, I created a "rubberband sandwich" tip with two pieces of rubberband around a circular sheet of bristol board. The fan span quite quickly but didn't push out wind particularly strong.

This became an issue when I realized the confetti was too heavy. Although construction paper was great for making many multicoloured pieces of confetti, the material is also rather heavy. The fan does blow around some of the bits, but has a relatively short range. In general, there was a lack of "chaos" that I was hoping to create inside this box.

Because these elements didn't come together as I expected they would, I didn't seal the box together in order to tweak it later. (This would explain the shoddily taped construction). To improve upon my design, I plan to do the following:

• Make a sturdier box or construct a better fan mount
• Use a more solidly constructed fan, such as those used to cool down CPUs
• Use lighter confetti, perhaps out of the light coloured paper used in gift bags

Overall the experience did teach me quite a bit about physics and motor mechanics. I'll certainly be applying this knowledge in version 2, which I will post about later.