Thanks Lass!
Have you tried CraftRobo? Could you do something similar to this by hand? How would you do the design work to make gears and other mechanisms? What software would you use? Add your ideas to the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.
4 thoughts on “Paper gears with CraftRobo”
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I’ve folded paper gears — one with 40 teeth! It can be a convenient way to prototype, but the gears are almost always either sloppy (unacceptably skipping teeth every once in a while) or far too tight (as you saw in the video).
You’ll notice that the video’s gears do not have a particularly clean tooth-profile. Even the original animation they show was a little strange in that regard, but the final gear — though really really cool — was pretty crude. It would be an interesting challenge to get a good involute, or even helical gear pair!
If you want some awesome software for paper-folding, check out Robert Lang, physicist-cum-origami artist. His work is entirely based on one-uncut-square folding, but he achieves at least as much variety with the constraint as I have seen in papercraft — plus he uses calculus ;)
Back in the late 80s, Maarten van Gelder had already come up with a set of origami gears:
http://www.mvg-ori.nl/fototxt/gearweel.htm