Ento - from entomorph, as in insect (ie: entomology) opter - that which flies like or by (my best guess for the meaning - ie: helicopter, ornithopter) So basically it's a design for an electromechanical insect wing. It's not finished yet, but it'll have two more springs and piezoretractors when finished. The piezoretractor would work by having a polymer on the bottom that bulges outwards when energized, thus pulling in the retractor pin. A counterspring pulls the wing back the other way. Thus energy only needs to pulse for 1/2 the wingsweep cycle - pretty clever eh? Seems like a workable design, was wondering what other modelers would think. I guess I'm going to model a pretty slick little gizmo for bugging a room. heheh...

Oops forgot the pic... LOL... Anyhow, whaddya think?

Cool! There's a machine called a fleet hopper in a story I wrote that was a cross between a motorcycle and a ladybird. The trigger wasn't electrical though, but chemical. the speed of the wing would be regulated by the rate of dripping of an activator chemical onto the polymer/muscle from a tank of some kind. Fancy having a go at the whole thing? regards peejay

what are you modeling that in?

Wings3D. It fits nicely within my budget constraints. LOL! But seriously, that's what I use to model stuff.

looks good real good..looks like i'll have to break dn and start playing with wings 3d

I agree - it's looking great. have you decided on scale at this early stage of construction or how many wings will be powering the device.?

That looks terrific, pauljs75! I admire how you are resolving the n-gon problems right at the onset. You might have missed one of them though. :o) The only piece of unsolicited advice I can offer is to get it to scale as soon as you decide what scale you want to be working in. This workflow "glitch" has set back my progress in setting up a scene and only because I had to go back and figure out the relative scale of objects to each other. Cheers! M

It's gonna be small. Quite small. The whole mechanism would fit easily in the palm of the hand. (Now that I think of it, the springs on the wingroot articuling assembly probably aren't the best design for this scale - but I'm too far along to just go and rework it. D'oh!) The body for the "microdrone entomopter" is going to essentially be an IC board with parts soldered and plugged into it. Power provided of course by one or two hearing aid or watch type batteries. I'm thinking of using two pairs of these wings like a dragonfly. Except this "dragonfly" will have a pinhole videocamera, a microphone, and an antenna hanging from the tail end. As for the n-gons, yeah I may have missed a few - but with Wings3D it's as simple as hitting F5 and looking for the selected polygons. I try to nip them in the bud ASAP as "n-gons BAAAD!" and they cause holes and artifacts during some renderings. If anyone's interested in as to how the chamfers on the extruded parts are controlled - it is done by adjustment of how tight the edgeloops are at the extrusion areas.

Added a few more parts to the wingroot articulating assembly (for lack of a better name.) The springs sure seem to have a good deal of polys, but they look good. With the base added, I suppose you can see better as to how it would move. I doubt I'll ever animate it though, as I have no effective way to morph the springs and have it look good with the programs I have. But it still looks cool.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=404705

I made a simple model to test it out. Nothing too fancy, but you get the idea. Still need a little bit more to finish it.