Curiosity Collective

Hoberman Sphere - the sphere of fear!

Posted by Dave on 05 September 2005 | 1 Comments

This is a project I started but never finished - I’d love to see it work properly!

I’ve got a Hoberman Sphere which with a length of fishing-wire and pully arrangement you can control it’s size. Using a Lego motor and Mindstorms kit I managed to automate it. I can control the size of the sphere via a Java appplication running on a computer and using a Infrared link. Unfortunately, even with a fair amount of gearing, the motor was never really up to it.

The original idea was to sense when someone came near (by camera, passive-infrared, etc) and contract the sphere, like a hedgehog - hence the sphere of fear! If you stood still it would gradually open-up.

I think to get this working we need to get a more powerful mechanism and a way of controlling it from the computer. It would also need a way of sensing how far the sphere is currently expanded - at the moment it simply runs the motor for as preset time known to be sufficient to open or close it.

Chuck Hoberman has created some brilliant expanding structures.

Posted in: Miscellaneous