Tumbling Hypercubes Zoetrope from Ken Perlin:
We’re still doing production on the little walking guy. But meanwhile my collaborator Eva Schindling and I managed to build a nice little working zoetrope of a tumbling hypercube.
For those of you who don’t know, a hypercube is something like a cube, only with four dimensions instead of three. As a cube is to a square, a hypercube is to a cube. I made a java applet some years back that lets you play with them.
Of course we don’t live in four dimensions, so it’s hard to get a feeling for what happens when you rotate four dimensional things. Eva and I thought that it would be cool, rather than looking at 4D things rotating on a computer screen, to create an animated sculpture of a rotating hypercube. That way you could look around it from all directions (at least, all 3D directions) as it does its weird 4D rotation.
Because a hypercube has four dimensions instead of three, it can rotate in some pretty fancy ways. A simple rotation only requires two dimensions. Since a hypercube has four dimensions, it can rotate one way in two of its dimensions, while rotating a different way in the other two dimensions….
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!