automaton

Sisyphean Automaton

Sisyphean Automaton

There are three movements, controlled from 3 axles, and the gears on the axles have prime numbers of teeth (23, 43, 59). So technically the movements will only repeat every 58,351 turns of the small gear. There’s also a semi-random toggle on the head motion, so it will never really quite repeat. Almost all the parts press fit and/or lock together, so the whole thing can be disassembled to a pile of parts, then reassembled, adjusted, and set going again without tools.

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Words Fail:  Brass Pegasus automaton

Words Fail: Brass Pegasus automaton

Keith Newstead has been refining this design for twenty years. It shows. It’s gorgeous just sitting there, but when it starts to move…well, I think I audibly sighed. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

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An actual Turing machine

An actual Turing machine

All joking aside, this thing may be the most beautiful piece of kinetic art I have ever seen. It has a Cartesian robot to draw 1s or 0s on the tape as needed, a rolling felt-covered drum for erasing symbols, a camera that can recognize what symbols have already been written, a bank of white LEDs to provide illumination for the camera, and a beautiful custom control panel.

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