She Hungers

A 3D printed project about a cat

Earlier this month I moved across the country to attend NYU ITP, the 2-year Interactive Telecommunications Program. This has meant leaving a darling, snuggly cat behind in San Francisco.

To make missing this fuzzy friend a little easier, I made a little timer to simulate her constant need for food.

It all started here:

I wanted this piece to:

Be physically interactive
Run mechanically, not digitally
Have a sense of whimsy (which is … uh … hard to quantify)

A couple of desired interactions:

The audience gets to “push down” the nose to reset the timer
The timer “yells” when it’s “hungry”

I tore the core out of a 60 minute focus timer to see how it works. Turns out, it’s almost exactly the same as an egg timer: a series of springs and pendulums, attached to a dial (and a hammer to ring the alarm).

Lucky for me, the dial was a press-fit onto the mechanism, so I could easily replace it with something custom.

I spent some time learning about 3d printing, using OnShape to create the CAD elements, and a Prusa3d to print. These are some pretty basic shapes, but they had to be modeled to fit the pre-existing parts on the timer itself.

It took a few tries to make sure the two pieces mated well; between the tolerances on the print and the errors in my measuring, things needed some adjusting along the way.

Now that the fit seemed snug, I could move on to translating the shape I imagined onto the part itself. I freehanded the shape of the head and placed the mount onto the back.