Making Things Move DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists Author: Dustyn Roberts | Language: English | ISBN:
0071741674 | Format: EPUB
Making Things Move DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists Description
A unique guide to practical mechanical design principles and their applicationsIn
Making Things Move, you'll learn how to build moving mechanisms through non-technical explanations, examples, and do-it-yourself projects--from art installations to toys to labor-saving devices. The projects include a drawing machine, a mini wind turbine, a mousetrap powered car, and more, but the applications of the examples are limited only by your imagination. A breadth of topics is covered ranging from how to attach couplers and shafts to a motor, to converting between rotary and linear motion.
Each chapter features photographs, drawings, and screenshots of the components and systems involved. Emphasis is placed on using off-the-shelf components whenever possible, and most projects also use readily available metals, plastics, wood, and cardboard, as well as accessible fabrication techniques such as laser cutting. Small projects in each chapter are designed to engage you in applying the material in the chapter at hand. Later in the book, more involved projects incorporate material from several chapters.
Making Things Move:- Focuses on practical applications and results, not abstract engineering theories
- Contains more than a dozen topic-focused projects and three large-scale projects incorporating lessons from the whole book
- Features shopping lists and guides to off-the-shelf components for the projects
- Incorporates discussions of new fabrication techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing, and how you can gain access
- Includes online component for continuing education with the book's companion website and blog (makingthingsmove.com)
Hands-on coverage of moving mechanisms Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines; Materials and Where to Find Them; Screwed or Glued? On Fastening and Joining Parts; Forces, Friction and Torque (Oh My); Mechanical and Electrical Power, Work, and Energy; Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Motor? - Creating and Controlling Motion; The Guts: Bearings, Bushings. Couplers, and Gears; Rotary vs. Linear Motion; Automatons and Mechanical Toys; Making Things and Getting Them Made; Projects
- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics; 1 edition (November 17, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0071741674
- ISBN-13: 978-0071741675
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
This book is a very fun and approachable book to getting started and excited about building/making things. I find this book is great for building the vocabulary needed to understand and build things. It's an easy read and is very digestible.
My biggest complaint is the disappointing electrical sections. The author spends effort trying to build intuition on mechanical devices; however this treatment stops when it comes to electrical design. The primary effort to give the reader intuition on circuits has a grotesque error (pg 102 fig 504) in the circuit diagram where the capacitor is misconnected (should be in parallel, not series!)
The author presents some basic equations such as ohms law, but does not provide examples on how it's used. A missed opportunity is when she explains diodes; instead she simply states a 220k resistor with 5V supply should be fine with most LEDs. The reader is lost what to do in any other situation.
While she provides detailed information on how to read mechanical data sheets for browsing McMaster; on the circuit side, all of this is missing on basic devices such as resistors, leds, transistors or capacitors. The reader will be completely lost attempting to browse the dizzying array of parts at digikey or mouser. The reader is pointed to canned solutions provided in the text with little intuition to expand or modify.
The author advocates the importance of sketching out mechanical diagrams, yet does not mention or even show any circuit schematics. Without understand how to read a schematic, it is difficult, if not impossible to communicate design and debug broken ones. Instead she attempts to communicate circuit diagrams with black and white pictures of bread boards...
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