Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Single pendulum harmonograph

A really long time ago, before this blog, before youtube and just as digital cameras were starting to become cool - I made a harmonograph with a neat single pendulum design.

I borrowed my friend's Etan's camera and took some video footage  - and recently decided to upload it to youtube.

To make a complete drawing took about ten minutes from when you let go of the weights. You can read more about the project, and the neat drawings I made on my website here.




5 comments:

  1. Seeing this, I got very nostalgic. I used to have a toy that did this when I was a kid, a sort of swinging red tray with a floating pen arm. You've made a super sized version ... very cool.

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  2. Thanks Peter!
    I think I've seen something like that somewhere else, a true harmonograph -but in miniature. I kind of wish they still made it.

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  3. Speaking of Spirograph, that is the lamest trademark ever. Cool toy, but the word already existed as did similar devices. How did they get away with making it Hasbro exclusive.

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  4. Interesting! yeah it has been around since at least 1860
    http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spirograph&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

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