4-Mation, a modular 3D Zoetrope; print your own animation

Projects & Prints
1

We took this and our other animation; Fish-eating-Fish, to New York Makerfaire last weekend and the reaction was pretty wild, I’m also taking it to MakerFaire Denver, and possibly Makerfaire Rome if you want to come and see in person.

It’s a modular 3D Zoetrope - download our ready to print animations (we’ll be creating a lot more), or create your own, or use lego mini figures.

The plan is to run a Kickstarter campaign in December, it’s early days yet, more polished videos and social media presence to come, but you can sign up for a kickstarter launch notification at www.4-mation.co.uk

If you sign up, you can win a machine in two launch competitions;

  • Submit your idea for an animation, and the best animation idea wins a machine and their animation idea made solid,
  • vote on your favourite animation idea to enter the draw for a machine.

Just one launch email (with campaign start date and how to enter competitions), and we won’t share your email with third parties.

Kevin.

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2

That looks pretty cool. Some friends recently made a zoetrope for Cleve Moler’s birthday. Here’s a link to the one they made.

3

This is incredible! Were each of those frogs hand painted? I’ll definitely be making one of these when they launch.

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4

Yes - painting is a labour of love, not for those seeking instant gratification. There is the lego mini figure option for the slightly less patient on the other hand :slight_smile:

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5

How did you do that without a strobe light? Or is there one I’m missing…

Really incredible! Do you have the STL files available? I’d undertake that project also. Great job.

6

@flyer4food strobes have to be turned off to film it. You can see me adjusting the carousel speed in the phone control app to match the camera frame rate.

When the strobes are running though, they automatically match the carousel at whatever speed it’s turning, the motor has an encoder generating nearly 7000 tics per output revolution, which the microcontoller uses to time the strobes to exactly 20 (or however many frames in the animation) per carousel rotation.

Print files for animations to be made available when we launch.

Note there’ll be affordable electronics only kits for people who want to make their own frames - sign up to get notified when the campaign starts.

7

I look forward to seeing this in person at the Denver maker faire.

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8

@StevePeters great!

9

oh cool… when’s that faire?

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@flyer4food Weekend Oct 14/15 Denver Mart : http://denver.makerfaire.com/directions/

If you and @StevePeters identify yourselves at my exhibit I’ll try to be extra helpful/informative :slight_smile:

11

I admired that at NYC Maker Faire: I had no idea that you’d printed them on a formlabs printer. well done!

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12

That’s very cool, Ray Harryhausen would be proud.

13

Nice work Kevin, that’s awesome!

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Update on this - we’re not ready to launch next week, which was our deadline before the seasonal shutdown, so we’re delaying till early 2018. We’re still waiting on walnut machining quotes, and we couldn’t set tier prices without those…

But, we are launching the animation design competition next week, and if we get enough entries we’ll run a second competition before we launch on Kicktarter.

So sign-up on the website 4-mation.co.uk to get an email with the competition details (and KS launch email next year) or like/follow us on facebook to stay up to date facebook.com/4dashmation

cheers,
Kevin

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