Arduino Animated Steampunk

There are lots of examples of amazing Steampunk constructions with intriguing, but lifeless components. This Instructable is about constructing an animated Steampunk art object that is controlled by an Arduino microprocessor.

The back-story is a fictional factory that cycles through a multistage process. It starts up with lights and sounds starting in a small tube in one corner, the needle on a big gauge starts rising, then a larger tube at the top lights up in different colors. Finally, the tall, glass reactor vessel lights up to start cooking some process. All this time, as the sequence progresses, it is accompanied by factory motor sounds and bubbling processes. Finally, a loud glass break noise hints that the process has come to a catastrophic end! Then the sequence starts reversing, with lights sequentially shutting down, the needle jumps around randomly, then decreases, finally, all lights are off, indicating the factory shutting down.

The emphasis of this Instructable is on the overall concept of Arduino animation with a few details about the physical construction techniques, not the details of the controlling software. Those will always be unique, but also pretty simple. Technically, all of the physical objects are optional finds, and up to your design and imagination. The goal is not to enable making an exact copy, it is to inspire others to create their own mock-retro-techno-scientific interpretations based on their own unique component finds.

If you find this project interesting, you may also find an Instructable I made to build an Arduino Rube Goldberg "Do Nothing Machine." The goal was to demonstrate how Arduino can be used with multiple sensors and actuators acting together to make another interesting device.

1. Glass Distillation Condenser column with straight inner tube (look on eBay "Vintage Lab Glassware")
2. Old pressure gauge (Check EBay for "vintage gauges")
3. Old radiator tube fins (highly optional)
4. Old radio tubes
5. Several LEDs
6. 5mm EL Glowing Wire and power supply (red, blue, and green) available from Amazon
7. 1/2" copper foil tape (used when making shorter EL wire lengths
8. shrink tube (to insulate the EL wire connection)
9. Arduino or Pi microprocessor
10. Adafruit Audio FX Sound Board + 2x2W Amp (Available from Adafruit)
11. 5v Breadboard Power Supply Module Compatible with Arduino to supplement the Arduino power
12. Micro Servo Motor (used to rebuild the gauge so it can be controlled by Arduino)
13. 1/4" thick, white PVC plastic sheet (the one shown is 15" x 18")
14. 1/2" copper tube and fittings (available at any hardware store)

This short video will illustrate the overall animated process concept. This is taken in partial darkness to highlight the changing illumination of the objects.

The first thing is to scope out the overall size of the project based on the size of the objects you are going to use. The largest in this project is the tall glass distillation column. Once you know its size you can arrange the connecting copper pipe to size the back board. In my case, I'm using a 15x18" sheet of white PVC that is 1/4" thick to be strong enough to hold all the components. After trimming the shape, the white sheet was painted blue. The copper pipe and fittings are 1/2" and available at any hardware store.

If you want to use a similar condenser in your construction you can find them with a little patience on EBay searching for Vintage Laboratory Glassware. When new, they can be high priced, but if you watch a while you can find one for $20 or less. I learned that the condensers with the spiral internal tube look cool, but are impossible to thread a strand of EL wire through the center core. You also need size it so the end connectors are compatible with the copper tube size, as they come in smaller and larger sizes.

You can thread the EL wire through the center of the column. Leave about a foot out the bottom end of the condenser. The supporting copper tube will be unique to your construction. But you will need to put a T fitting at the bottom. You can cut a clearance hole in the backboard for the center of the T fitting to open to the back of the backboard. As you assemble the copper pipe and distillation column, you need to feed the dangling end of the EL wire through tube and out the T fitting so it can be connected on the back of the board.

I attached 1/4" brass tubing fittings using silicon rubber glue to the two barb connectors on the column and then fed a short length of EL wire into the barb and the other end through a flange to the back of the supporting sheet. These are short lengths cut from the same or different rolls of EL wire.

Instructions for cutting and adding new wiring to EL wire are on this link. This is easy, but tricky until you read how it is done. EL wire runs off of 400Hz AC voltage, so it needs to be connected to special EL wire power supply that usually comes with the wire. These are difficult to control with an Arduino, so it takes a small circuit that uses a TRIAC to sequence them on/off. The details are beyond the scope of this Instructable, but this link gives enough information.

This construction has two vintage glass radio tubes that are illuminated to simulate a step in the factory process. You can find tubes from garage sales or on eBay doing a search for Vintage Radio Tubes. While all these tubes originally lit up with an internal filament, those require significant current that is beyond the range of what can be controlled by an Arduino. They also only glow orange. The alternative is to illuminate the tube by adding an LED to it bottom. This is done by attaching it with silicon cement as shown in the figure. The last figure shows how the tubes can then be attached copper tube fittings with silicon cement so it can become part of the copper tube assembly. Long wires can be attached to LED that can be fed through the copper tube assembly to one of the T's that poke through the back panel where the wires can be connected.

This step does not have a standard solution and will require some ingenuity. Vintage gauges can be easily animated under computer control by replacing the mechanical guts of the original gauge with a micro servo motor. Details are not shown since the mechanical they will vary depending on the original gauge construction. Disassemble the gauge carefully so you can pry the indicator pointer off of its shaft and remove the existing movement. The servo motor can then be mounted on the back side. The tricky part is to get a new shaft the same diameter as the pointer. A good hobby shop they will have small brass rods around 1/16" and smaller. You can cut a short piece that will slide into the pointer on one end and the other end will side into and epoxied in open hole on the end of the servo gear.

The Arduino sketch to animate the pointer will depend on your imagination, but it can be as simple as a loop that moves the pointer to several positions with delay statements between, could gradually increase, or have random jumpy movement.

An alternative to the micro stepper is to get a x27 589 Automotive Gauge Stepper from Amazon. These are now used in all automobile dash boards, so they already have small shafts that will be the right size for many pointer shafts.

This step is the construction of the controller and power electronics. I mounted an Arduino Uno, the EL wire inverters and an additional power supply on a prototyping board. Skipping details here, but it not very complicated to connect these modules to the wiring for each of the different factory components. The FX sound board is not shown here, but it is mounted on stand-offs on the same board.

A pseudo-code version of the Factory Arduino Sketch is shown here. In addition to the pseudo -ode, a version of the Arduino Sketch is attached below.