Mechanical actions underlie much of what makes modern day society function, whether it’s electric motors, combustion engines, switches, levers, or the springs inside a toy blaster gun that propel foam darts at unsuspecting siblings. Yet as useful as it would be to scale such mechanisms down to microscopic levels, this comes with previously minor issues on a macroscopic factors, such as friction and mechanical strength, becoming quickly insurmountable. Or to put in more simple terms, how to make a functioning toy blaster gun small enough to be handled by ants? This is the topic which [Mark Rober] explores in a recent video.
The answer is to use a single structure that comprises not only the frame of the blaster, but also the spring mechanism that stores the mechanical energy and the trigger mechanism. This is referred to as a compliant mechanism (CM), and [Mark] collaborated with Brigham Young University (BYU) and its Compliant Mechanism Research group in order to design a suitable CM for an ant-sized blaster gun. After a few design iterations a version was created that’s also been released on Thingiverse as STL files.
Creating a mechanism using a single strand of DNA and scaffolding that binds to its opposing pattern, forcing the base DNA string to maintain a specific shape.
Naturally, this version can be created fairly easily by anyone who has access to an FDM or SLA 3D printer, but where things get interesting is when the model gets scaled down further and ..
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