An expanding recursive mechanism, plus some variants. You can download the files to print these mechanism for yourself from www.printables.com/model/5577...
That's so funny, for me I thought it was just an engineering student/someone with a 3d printer, this seemed far too non-abstract to be a Segerman video lol. But obviously you understand something I don't😅.
These demos remind me of the Hoberman Sphere - that spiky ball toy that expands and contracts through a bunch of linked scissor mechanisms. The Hoberman Sphere is recursive too, except there the components have a network of relationships rather than just a chain of relationships.
Commonly seen on indulgence feasts in Poland - stands with cheap (often knockoff) toys, sweets and especially indulgence obwarzanki (a very light and dry kind of ring shaped bread, no idea how it's made, availble basically only on those indulgence feasts) spring up around churches on the day of that church's patron. Usually in summer. I remember having that kind of toy, but idk if it's still somewhere around in the house.
technically you could say that it's an inverted hoberman sphere. Inversion is a geometrical transformation which (in 3d) changes planes into spheres and vice versa.
I tried to put a servo on one of the joints of a plastic Hoberman Sphere so that I could remotely expand and contract it for dramatic effect. It didn't really work as my servo didn't have enough torque. I wondered if the sphere I had relied to some extent on the flexibility of the thin plastic struts or whether a solid metal construction would also work if the joints were ball / socket.
i would love to see a video about your process for creating mechanisms like this! do you use any programs or simulations when you're throwing ideas around? maybe we could see some early prototypes of some of your projects?
Did you ever even bother to check the description? It contains the weblink for the PDF download... And BTW (by the way)... THIS is basically THE VIDEO about creating mechanisms like these.
@@OmenAkumaru20223 ....why so condescending?? To answer your question, I did check the description. At the time of writing this and my original comment, it only contains a link to the files for 3d printing. If it wasn't clear somehow, what I'm curious about is the creative process behind projects like this. This video doesn't get into that at all, it just shows off the final mechanism. I want to know how he prototypes, problem solves, etc. (Henry if you are reading this strange thread, I am still very interested
@@noahgiom341 The very short answer is that these recursive racks came from thinking about Oskar's Tailspin mechanism, and wondering what would happen if we swapped out one kind of gearing (the spur gears in Tailspin) for another (sliding racks). The geared cube net is the same thing, but using bevel gears instead of spur gears. The prototyping stages are presumably not that different from how anyone prototypes - I design stuff in my CAD program (Rhino) and test it out. I implemented my own gear/rack code, then I tested out how small I could print gears before they stopped working smoothly. Having determined the sizes of my gears and racks, I then made a box with two racks and a gear, and found that I had a lot of friction. So then I modified the design to decrease the surface contact areas between parts. And there's also some stuff to do with designing for the filament based printer I have - thinking about the print orientations of the various parts and how to bolt things together.
@@OmenAkumaru20223 bruh he's asking how to *design* these things as in engineering. Instead of being a cunt you could try maybe double checking things instead of just lashing out at your own confusion.
I really want to see a machinist like This Old Tony make some of these and see if he can come up with a practical function for them, like perhaps for shelving or something. Utterly fascinating and deeply original, as always it seems. You never cease to astound me!
Shapeways is going to lose a lot of business now that Henry has developed the ability to magically bring parts into existence by simply pointing his finger. 😉
Seeing how the original worked, and then seeing the second one, I was actually pretty happy with myself for being able to work out how the second one would work relatively quickly. That being said, once you did confirm it, I immediately thought of trying to find a way to use these and other slightly modified racks to act as logic gates. Would be very interesting.
Love the video! If you take the first design, add a pin to the center box (attaching it to the surface below it), add another pin to the end of the left most gear rack, and a marker to the end of the right most gear rack. You will get a drawing copy machine! Love it!
I quite like the unique way this mechanism behaves! I think the most interesting thing about these recursive mechanisms is how it made me really look at the different reference points when figuring out how it behaved :)
As somebody who prints and unpowders alot of your models its always great when I see them come through! Would it be possible to make a cube with recursive racks? Some thing like a Hoberman sphere or similar.
I swear, this will be how certain meta-materials will work some day when we can get consistent "gears" made of bio-mechanical components/layers. I imagine this could be a great mechanism for frequency combing.
@@aeremthirteen2771 Paper is called "Step-by-step rotation of a molecule-gear mounted on an atomic-scale axis". Also "A Simple Example of a Molecule-Gear Train: PF3 Molecules on a Cu(111) Surface"
Im very excited for the self-evident impending analog computer renaissance! Minimizing AI control system energy requirements is all we need now, and quantum paradigms are expanding into a new knowledge tree/growth more and more exponentially lately!
I feel like the last contraption makes an involute curve It interesting to see what kind of movement you get with only racks and gear and the application they can have
This makes me so intrigued about this idea I had years ago to make a mechanical software interface. This would be the perfect set of mechanisms to make photoshops basic transformation tools!
This reminds me of pantogarph mechanisms like used in various extension mechanism. Your last example in particular looks like a different take on a mechanism oft used in drafting machine, whereas the top bracket and the end unit must always stay parrallel relative to one another (so that lines remain parrallel). In these machines this was at first accomplished with a pantograph, with two rods comprising each segment of the arm. On later american machines, they switch to steel belts, which are put in tension so that they grip their respective wheels. The top and bottom disks are fixed, as is the elbow of the machine; so whatever movement is affected, the end still stays parallel. In very nice machines, the steel belt was welded in a manner as to never loose tension. Cheaper models used a belt with a tensioning nut on each band and their loosening could cause errors in the drawing. However the geared rack idea perhaps could be applied in keeping those two points fixed in a different manner. Either with solid racks around toothed gears, or perhaps with a toothed belt.
Played with the gear cube at opensauce and found it delightful. There’s always a small surprise when it arrives perfectly cube or perfectly flat from its intermediate folded states. The “recursiveness” of these makes me wonder about how you would formulate an energy transfer equation for n segments. That exploding outro was great 😆
I think it could be a very interesting exercise to see if you could use specific combinations of these to create "linkages" that trace specific paths, similar to Fourier epicycles
10:26 this one reminds me of watching the overcomplicated windscreen wiper mechanisms on buses in late 1980s Ireland. Mesmerising and yet almost perpetually broken...
As a scientist who has solved most of the problems of the world I still have to watch this video over and over again to get how it really is working. It helps to have the as real objects in the hand so one can observe the behavior. You Henry are one big genious is all I can say. Thanks 1000 times for posting this piece of art and technology.
You probably dont see this a a proble to solve but, You could force the first, and I thing second, recursive rack and pinion to be flat (not stair stepped) by fixing the height of each rack to a constant value based on orientation. It would require a means of selecting the height of the rack fixed to the box to 1 of 4 values, either with spacers or custom shapes for each orientation. But completely doable
I'd love to see what can be done using different gear ratios between "incoming" and "outgoing" racks of each box. Would it just change the slope of the diagonal movements of adjacent boxes or can you create more complex movements using that?
Sorry made a comment twice and deleted. Thinking about this is difficult at 4am. Especially when I misinterpret the device for 6 minutes because I was typing lol. Anyway, I think if you put gears pairs into the boxes with correct ratios it should be possible? It would basically twist the path a little if you did achieve it though, shouldn't allow any more complicated movements. Though I must confess I can't think of what other movements this system can really produce.
if sufficiently small or large it can scale pixel art within the distance that the illusion takes place. Thanks for this kind of videos Henry greetings from Venezuela
It would be fun to see what kind of fun mechanisms you could come up with by making the straight racks curved. So in addition to translation you'd get also rotation.
The pure rack and pinion recursive mechanisms could absolutely work without the constant step up every iteration - if you take either version rotated to a vertical grid, the similarly orientated racks obviously never cross over each other, the horizontal grey racks never cross over with the vertical green racks, and the vertical grey racks never cross over with the horizontal green racks, so there are two separate sets of racks that could each occupy one vertical space without ever colliding with each other. That said, you would need to tweak the design slightly - I doubt you could just rearrange the parts you've already made to do that.
These are wonderful! immediate thoughts are: can you make grids of any of these or do the always lock?; and that there's some connection to the wallpaper groups though that might be a miss-association. .. but that's definitely the rest of my Sunday gone :) really fun vid !
I would love to see some practical applications to these mechanisms. The parallels of the racks and of arbitrary points of the racks look like there should be ways to take advantage of it, but it is hard to envision with the video only demonstrating the simplest form of the mechanism.
How did I look at this thumbnail + title and instantly think "that's a Henry Segerman video" 😂 Mans got a style
That's so funny, for me I thought it was just an engineering student/someone with a 3d printer, this seemed far too non-abstract to be a Segerman video lol. But obviously you understand something I don't😅.
*does the default dance from Henry Stickman*
Saw the title and thumbnail, thought "cool", clicked and thought "seems a bit like what Henry Segerman would do-"
Your pfp takes me back
Your PFP tells me you're Loyal to the Herd.
These demos remind me of the Hoberman Sphere - that spiky ball toy that expands and contracts through a bunch of linked scissor mechanisms. The Hoberman Sphere is recursive too, except there the components have a network of relationships rather than just a chain of relationships.
We used to have one of those! It was super fun to play with and toss around :)
Commonly seen on indulgence feasts in Poland - stands with cheap (often knockoff) toys, sweets and especially indulgence obwarzanki (a very light and dry kind of ring shaped bread, no idea how it's made, availble basically only on those indulgence feasts) spring up around churches on the day of that church's patron. Usually in summer. I remember having that kind of toy, but idk if it's still somewhere around in the house.
isn't it offically called the "Ikea Death Star" now ?
technically you could say that it's an inverted hoberman sphere. Inversion is a geometrical transformation which (in 3d) changes planes into spheres and vice versa.
I tried to put a servo on one of the joints of a plastic Hoberman Sphere so that I could remotely expand and contract it for dramatic effect. It didn't really work as my servo didn't have enough torque. I wondered if the sphere I had relied to some extent on the flexibility of the thin plastic struts or whether a solid metal construction would also work if the joints were ball / socket.
I'm just shocked how damn smooth that contraption works 😲😲😲
It helps that there's a bit of vaseline on the racks...
i would love to see a video about your process for creating mechanisms like this! do you use any programs or simulations when you're throwing ideas around? maybe we could see some early prototypes of some of your projects?
Did you ever even bother to check the description? It contains the weblink for the PDF download...
And BTW (by the way)... THIS is basically THE VIDEO about creating mechanisms like these.
@@OmenAkumaru20223 ....why so condescending?? To answer your question, I did check the description. At the time of writing this and my original comment, it only contains a link to the files for 3d printing. If it wasn't clear somehow, what I'm curious about is the creative process behind projects like this. This video doesn't get into that at all, it just shows off the final mechanism. I want to know how he prototypes, problem solves, etc. (Henry if you are reading this strange thread, I am still very interested
@@noahgiom341 The very short answer is that these recursive racks came from thinking about Oskar's Tailspin mechanism, and wondering what would happen if we swapped out one kind of gearing (the spur gears in Tailspin) for another (sliding racks). The geared cube net is the same thing, but using bevel gears instead of spur gears. The prototyping stages are presumably not that different from how anyone prototypes - I design stuff in my CAD program (Rhino) and test it out. I implemented my own gear/rack code, then I tested out how small I could print gears before they stopped working smoothly. Having determined the sizes of my gears and racks, I then made a box with two racks and a gear, and found that I had a lot of friction. So then I modified the design to decrease the surface contact areas between parts. And there's also some stuff to do with designing for the filament based printer I have - thinking about the print orientations of the various parts and how to bolt things together.
@@OmenAkumaru20223 bruh he's asking how to *design* these things as in engineering. Instead of being a cunt you could try maybe double checking things instead of just lashing out at your own confusion.
noahgiom341 wins!
You really do explore some wondrous mechanisms that are very mesmerizing to watch in motion! Thanks for all your brain scratching displays!
I really want to see a machinist like This Old Tony make some of these and see if he can come up with a practical function for them, like perhaps for shelving or something.
Utterly fascinating and deeply original, as always it seems.
You never cease to astound me!
Shapeways is going to lose a lot of business now that Henry has developed the ability to magically bring parts into existence by simply pointing his finger. 😉
One of the best ideas I ever seen! So smart, so simple, so mechanic!
Well done.
Satisfying yet functioning and incredibly fast-responsive mechanism. Nice extra details from prior projects you had included in this video.
I always love the mechanisms that you come up with. It just got way better, now that I realized I also have a 3D printer!
Please add a make to the printables page if you make some of these!
@@henryseg Will do! Working on my second color right now
i love the no bs intro. 7s of displaying something really cool then on to explaining it.
Seeing how the original worked, and then seeing the second one, I was actually pretty happy with myself for being able to work out how the second one would work relatively quickly. That being said, once you did confirm it, I immediately thought of trying to find a way to use these and other slightly modified racks to act as logic gates. Would be very interesting.
Just wonderful - this is as beautiful as it is functional. Thank you for sharing!
Love the video! If you take the first design, add a pin to the center box (attaching it to the surface below it), add another pin to the end of the left most gear rack, and a marker to the end of the right most gear rack. You will get a drawing copy machine! Love it!
Henry Segerman videos never disappoint
this feels like such a cool thing to be able to pull out at a party
these mechanisms are just so cool and satisfying!
How you managed to get the action so incredibly smooth on 3D printed parts is simply beyond me
\ Vaseline /
@@HaloWolf102 lubricant UwU
I quite like the unique way this mechanism behaves! I think the most interesting thing about these recursive mechanisms is how it made me really look at the different reference points when figuring out how it behaved :)
As somebody who prints and unpowders alot of your models its always great when I see them come through! Would it be possible to make a cube with recursive racks? Some thing like a Hoberman sphere or similar.
They used to have those really cool expanding globes that were made of plastic too
@@simonlinser8286 I think I still have one of those somewhere on my shelf. May have given it to my nephew though.
@@simonlinser8286that’s what a Hoberman Sphere is mate
"Alot"?
I love the future, thanks to 3d printing, streaming services, i can watch this wonderful lesson in recursive mechanics ^^ Thanks for this!
I swear, this will be how certain meta-materials will work some day when we can get consistent "gears" made of bio-mechanical components/layers. I imagine this could be a great mechanism for frequency combing.
Such has been created already, the issue is mass producing them
@incription Id love to see articles/li ks if you have any, friend! Gears even? :o
@@aeremthirteen2771 Paper is called "Step-by-step rotation of a molecule-gear mounted on an atomic-scale axis". Also "A Simple Example of a Molecule-Gear Train: PF3 Molecules on a Cu(111) Surface"
Not seen it done with cogs, but there's materials now that get fatter when stretched, for example.
Im very excited for the self-evident impending analog computer renaissance! Minimizing AI control system energy requirements is all we need now, and quantum paradigms are expanding into a new knowledge tree/growth more and more exponentially lately!
Oh man, that movement is buttery smooth
You make my world much more interesting, thank you!
This reminds me of K'NEX and ERECTOR sets. Many fun times as a kid.
I dig the inadvertent optical illusion! As the boxes are drawn together, they appear to grow bigger.
I feel like the last contraption makes an involute curve
It interesting to see what kind of movement you get with only racks and gear and the application they can have
This reminds me of what would happen if you moved one part of a portal into the other end. Looks awesome!
I really like these. Great job👍🏼
Absolutely lovely, thank you for sharing!
That motion is mesmerizing
That's a delightful movement.
This makes me so intrigued about this idea I had years ago to make a mechanical software interface. This would be the perfect set of mechanisms to make photoshops basic transformation tools!
Incredible the last rotating example!
that's actually really cool, subscribed!
Fascinating, I can see this being great for extending solar panels on a spacecraft.
Telling the wife I'm watching a video about racks
Having Caleb Widogast explain an expanding mechanism was something I didn't know I needed.
I love your contraptions
This reminds me of pantogarph mechanisms like used in various extension mechanism. Your last example in particular looks like a different take on a mechanism oft used in drafting machine, whereas the top bracket and the end unit must always stay parrallel relative to one another (so that lines remain parrallel). In these machines this was at first accomplished with a pantograph, with two rods comprising each segment of the arm. On later american machines, they switch to steel belts, which are put in tension so that they grip their respective wheels. The top and bottom disks are fixed, as is the elbow of the machine; so whatever movement is affected, the end still stays parallel. In very nice machines, the steel belt was welded in a manner as to never loose tension. Cheaper models used a belt with a tensioning nut on each band and their loosening could cause errors in the drawing. However the geared rack idea perhaps could be applied in keeping those two points fixed in a different manner. Either with solid racks around toothed gears, or perhaps with a toothed belt.
Amazing mechanism man...
very thought provoking. i feel like these demonstrate the concept of multiplication via repeated addition
This is so interesting I’m definitely subscribing if there’s more stuff like this
So simple yet so cool
These are really cool!
Yessss, 10 seconds in and I was hoping he would do it, and he did at the very end.
This is amazing! Going to have to incorporate it into my Rube Goldberg project!
So satisfying to look at 😊
Played with the gear cube at opensauce and found it delightful. There’s always a small surprise when it arrives perfectly cube or perfectly flat from its intermediate folded states. The “recursiveness” of these makes me wonder about how you would formulate an energy transfer equation for n segments. That exploding outro was great 😆
Beautiful work
Good example of the breadth of results possible when considering inverting a member of a recursive structure.
you always amaze me henry! I have yet to watch the video, but props for what you do in the field of mathematics and 3d design!
I think it could be a very interesting exercise to see if you could use specific combinations of these to create "linkages" that trace specific paths, similar to Fourier epicycles
This could make a cool puzzle game. Where you have a given input and output and you need to place the racks.
God I love your videos. Thank you for bringing me ideas to me for drawing
Spooky action at a distance indeed 🔥
Fascinating. I wonder how large of a recursive rack and pinion model you could build before it was too hard to move by hand.
This is kinda magical.
This reminds me of the Hoberman Sphere, very nice!
Great video!
these would be great fun incorporated into children's toys
10:26 this one reminds me of watching the overcomplicated windscreen wiper mechanisms on buses in late 1980s Ireland. Mesmerising and yet almost perpetually broken...
Aaaa this is so cool! The only thing we feel is missing is experimenting with different gearing ratios.
As a scientist who has solved most of the problems of the world I still have to watch this video over and over again to get how it really is working. It helps to have the as real objects in the hand so one can observe the behavior. You Henry are one big genious is all I can say. Thanks 1000 times for posting this piece of art and technology.
You probably dont see this a a proble to solve but, You could force the first, and I thing second, recursive rack and pinion to be flat (not stair stepped) by fixing the height of each rack to a constant value based on orientation. It would require a means of selecting the height of the rack fixed to the box to 1 of 4 values, either with spacers or custom shapes for each orientation. But completely doable
I'd love to see what can be done using different gear ratios between "incoming" and "outgoing" racks of each box. Would it just change the slope of the diagonal movements of adjacent boxes or can you create more complex movements using that?
Sorry made a comment twice and deleted.
Thinking about this is difficult at 4am. Especially when I misinterpret the device for 6 minutes because I was typing lol.
Anyway, I think if you put gears pairs into the boxes with correct ratios it should be possible? It would basically twist the path a little if you did achieve it though, shouldn't allow any more complicated movements. Though I must confess I can't think of what other movements this system can really produce.
Beautiful mechanism. I wonder if you could apply this to create an actively variable reed for weaving processes.
if sufficiently small or large it can scale pixel art within the distance that the illusion takes place. Thanks for this kind of videos Henry greetings from Venezuela
this made me smile =]
love it - thanks henry x
It would be fun to see what kind of fun mechanisms you could come up with by making the straight racks curved. So in addition to translation you'd get also rotation.
The pure rack and pinion recursive mechanisms could absolutely work without the constant step up every iteration - if you take either version rotated to a vertical grid, the similarly orientated racks obviously never cross over each other, the horizontal grey racks never cross over with the vertical green racks, and the vertical grey racks never cross over with the horizontal green racks, so there are two separate sets of racks that could each occupy one vertical space without ever colliding with each other.
That said, you would need to tweak the design slightly - I doubt you could just rearrange the parts you've already made to do that.
w
Very nice even if I can’t think of an application where it can be used 😉 Thanks for sharing 👍🏼
Nice technical art.
Mechanism is quite cool
We know he's heading towards some kind of analogue computer made with these things...
That first gearset would make for a super interesting mechanism for a light sliding door.
Incredible!
These are wonderful! immediate thoughts are: can you make grids of any of these or do the always lock?; and that there's some connection to the wallpaper groups though that might be a miss-association. .. but that's definitely the rest of my Sunday gone :) really fun vid !
Very cool and fun. Maybe this could be used to work out the folding hardtop mechanism on a convertible?
It's like a scissor lift but with gears. Neat.
I love how racks move
I'm big dumb... but this was so visually satisfying... asmr at it's finest.
OH MY GOD
That is so and smooth as F
I gonna install the motor in it to keep reapting the motion for my youtube background
you could absolutely sell these as fidget mechanisms. I'd love to have one on my desk.
If you have access to a 3d printer you can make your own! Link in the description.
i really want this has some sorta fidget toy.... definitely printing this out!
cool model
you should make a book or document of all the mechanisms you've designed
I’m working on the second edition of my book, with a new chapter on mechanisms. So, it’s on the way!
super satisfying
Nice! If the green boxes start in a line, they will stay on he same line. Same with the grey boxes. Cool concept :D
This has ‘clockwork theory of everything’ energy
Brilliant!
Wow so cool.
What about curving the racks? I wonder what it would do.
I would love to see some practical applications to these mechanisms. The parallels of the racks and of arbitrary points of the racks look like there should be ways to take advantage of it, but it is hard to envision with the video only demonstrating the simplest form of the mechanism.
SO cool!
Would love to see the 3D recursive rack via the geared borramean rings.
These remind me of the infinite continuity splines mentioned in Freya Holmér's video "The Continuity of Splines".
This is actually so cool and taught me so much I was not expecting to learn so much from this lmao thank you!
✨New subscriber acquired✨
Who else said "Huh, spooky action at a distance" 5 seconds before he did
Unexpected, maybe, but not spooky. The rack explicitly transfers force.
That first one definitely reminds me of a pantograph in operation