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"Nuts and bolts":
interactive exibits
Exhibit
development & fabrication
Designs
& performance specifications
Discovery
Disks: mobile mini-interactives
'Beam Cam' projecting video microscope
Underwater
Street Discovery Centre
Moscow
Planetarium
Sellafield
Visitor Centre
'Alternative
energy'
Earth
Science
Fixed
Discovery Disks, Glasgow
Air-table,
telescope, moon-phases
Astronomy
exhibits for Valencia
Biometrics
Magnetic
field exhibit for CERN, Geneva
Tabletop
Discovery Disks: magnetism
Tabletop
Discovery Disks: Light
More
Light interactives
"Academic"
interactives: The Energy Enzyme
"Academic
interactives": Electron beams
"Academic
interactives": Mantle geology
Working
canal-lock model
Virtual
exhibit: Ich bin einmalig
Chemistry
interactives: Chirality
Video
microscopes: Melting crystal
Push-button
quiz: Breath of life
Environmental
& biological
Cookbook
outlines of my 1992 "classical" Great Explorations interactives
Talk to me!
UK phone/fax
+44 (0) 1663 743794
Email ian@interactives.co.uk
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Working
canal-lock
For Etruria Industrial Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, UK 2002
Here was an interesting challenge: to design and build a LOW-MAINTENANCE,
hands-on, working canal-lock model.
Of course, working canal-lock models have been made before, but they
always seem to involve users getting their hands wet. Wet hands mean a
wet floor, wet graphics and serious hygeine problems as bacteria rapidly
transform "handled" water into a cloudy, dangerous, stinking
soup of decomposing human skin particles.
It took some careful thinking to come up with this dry-hands design with
control knobs projecting through a 10mm toughened glass cover.
The sluice gates work just like real ones, and are opened and closed
by raising and lowering the round knobs. But what about the lock gates?
Water pressure prevents real lock gates from being opened
unless levels are exactly the same on both sides. It would be easy to
open small-scale model lock gates with water piled up against them, and
I knew for sure that most children would try this for the sheer satisfaction
of sending catastrophic "tidal waves" down the canal...
You can see my elegant design solution in the picture above: a deliberately
weak magnetic linkage that can only open a lock gate when the water levels
are equal on both sides. When the level is higher on the upstream side,
turning the cylindrical knob simply moves the grey magnet in the clear
plastic arm without this being able to move the red magnet attached to
the gate. It works really well.
Next challenge: how to move the barge without being able to touch it.
Solution: another red knob on the front of the unit is attached to another
magnetic assembly, out of sight inside the case. But, wait a minute, our
model barge rises falls more than 150mm as the water level changes. So
next we designed a solution to that...
A continuously running electrical pump circulates the water.
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