Simple Mechanical Animation Mechanism

Heyhey! This is my attempt at creating an animation mechanism for animations that loop. This project was inspired by one of the projects made by Melonshu with a modification so that a 10 frame animation would be looped.

Check out Melonshu's Video!

1. Access to a 3D printer
2. Your filament of choice
3. Glue
4. Adhesive for 3D prints (I used 3D Gloop)
5. Printer (Being able to print in color is preferred, but black and white is perfectly fine)
6. M3 Screws

When I first designed the mechanism, I made a test mechanism to see how I would need to design the structure to support it and learn animation skills on Fusion. For this I had a simple crank connected with a 48T Bevel Gear that drives a 12T Pinion, creating a 1:4 gear ratio. This is then supplies the rotational motion to a 6 slot geneva drive. For designing the actual mechanism, one tweak I made is that the 12T Gear was to be printed as a part of its shaft so that the rotational motion to be transferred to the geneva drive easier and changed the geneva drive from 6 slot to 10 slot.

Great Video by Maker's Muse on designing a Geneva Mechanism!

For designing the structures, the frame is made in two parts that connected via M3 screws. Holes were added to the left side and bottom for assisting in holding and also reducing the amount of filament needed. For the platform that shows the animation, it is connected to the driven wheel of the geneva drive via a hex shaft and the walls make a decagon shape to have 10 frames. If you want to make a platform for your own animation, the height of the walls may have to be adjusted to fit the frames. One issue I had while testing the animation mechanism is that the driven wheel rotated too much compared to the drive wheel which caused the mechanism to get stuck. Thus to reduce the angular momentum, the size of the platform was reduced which fixed the problem.

For 3D printing the parts any filament can be used, however for the platform specifically I used white PLA to match the background of the frames. From then on, the assembly was quite simple where Gloop was used to connect the 48T bevel gear and hand crank. For printing the animation frames, I had to adjust the size of the gif frames so that they would fit the walls of the platform which can be done with any photo editing software. These frames were then attached to the platform via glue. After this, the mechanism is complete!

For possible improvements, one disadvantage of having the animation mechanism be 10 frames is that the frames have to be quite small without having the entire thing be huge and use up a lot of filament. Furthermore, I would also like to add a shutter to create a smoother animation, similar to a film projector.