Why?

I noticed that Penne pasta look kinda like gears and then I couldn't take the picture of many many pieces of pasta engaging each other in a mesmerising dance out of my head anymore. They would all switch the visible side and display something else (like a tri-vision sign display) while still being silly pasta. Sick!

How?

So I started on this quest towards a culinary kinetic sculpture by trying to sandwich a row of penne between 2 sheets of clear acrylic.

Everything will be powered by the popular small 28BYJ-48 stepper and ULN2003 driver duo. It has more than enough power and speed I don't really need. Also, the Wemos/Lolin D1 Mini, my fav microcontroller.

All good, except they don't transmit the movement too far despite me cherry picking the most uniform penne out of the bag (using a 3D printed jig).

Options at this point:

1. find better pasta - the issues that I have seem to come from the method of production of pasta, and uniformity is probably not the main KPI for the factory
2. fix this pasta, and for this I have 2 ideas
   1. grind them to a more perfect cylinder - would destroy the ridges too
   2. soften them and dry them back in a sort of a mold - they crack badly when drying back
3. cut away the ends where the most distortion seems to happen

So I went with 3. because I haven't heard of sunk-cost fallacy. Tedious work, but now they seem to work a little better. So I switched to power tools and went for it.

I also reworked the enclosure into 2 rows becasue they are now kind of short and sad looking.

For the new enclosure (pic below) I used the technique I documented previously in a video (DIY: Crystal Clear 3D Prints with Acrylic): incorporate the clear acrylic panels in while printing to get a one piece, no-assembly final enclosure straight out of the print bed. This also gives me effortless precision, e.g. for the middle divider in this design.

The news is bad though. They fail to engage.

So I completely scratched this approach at this point, there's no more saving. The tolerances in the pasta industry are worse than the very first 3D printer prototype ever created.

Cannelloni

Searching for a better pasta alternative, I found cannelloni, these large pasta tubes that you'd stuff with filling or fill with stuff and bake. It's gigantic when compared to the regular penne.

So I organised 8 or them in a row and put them on (real) geared stands. It was tricky to find the balance between too tolerant (they would wobble) and too strict (they would crack), but the final design works well.

The same stepper, same driver, same ESP8266. Now with an added push button and a 3D printed enclosure to hold everything together nicely and keep the whole sculpture upright.

I hand painted something on them for a first test and it works pretty smooth. The stepper is quiet so it can just run in the background of my room.

Is that all?

No. The journey continues with me trying to find better ways to now print stuff on the cannelloni, but you'll have to check the youtube video at the top for that, I feel like it's out of the scope of this article.

Future plans?

In the immediate future, besides the kinetic sculpture, this design will make for a nice escape room puzzle, where you'll have to correlate the information on both sides to get the solution, so I'll use it as such as I'm also building escape rooms.

As a closing line, I want to say a big thank you to PCBWay for supporting me in making these projects and I encourage you to check their services if haven't already, they might just unblock that project that got stuck in the production phase.