The Trials and Tribulations of Building a Pasta Display
1 min read
Summary
Hackaday reports that while penne pasta looks like it could make effective gear wheels, in reality it doesn’t work well mechanically, so a Hackday user, Julius Curt, has had to rethink how to use pasta in an electromechanical display.
After trying and failing to use penne pasta in his design, Curt switched to much larger cannelloni pasta, which have been stuffed with a 3D-printed armature and thus physically attached to a gear, so that when one is rotated by a stepper motor, the others follow.
The result is a novel rotating display that allows several different messages or images to be shown, depending on how much artwork is applied to each piece of pasta and how it is arranged.
