Our automaton will be a physical depiction of what happens when the three rules governing a mogwai. In the movie "Gremlins" there was a character called Gizmo. He was a mogwai. It was supposed to be some sort of animal that came from the Orient. There were three rules one had to follow if he were to take care of a mogwai. The first rule was that the mogwai had to be kept out of bright light. If this rule was broken the animal would melt and die. The second rule was that the mogwai could not get wet. If one were to get wet it would reproduce. The reproduction was asexual and small balls of fur would fly off the mogwai's back with each ball turning into a new mogwai. The last rule was that mogwais could not be fed after midnight. If this occurred, the mogwai would form a cocoon and turn into a gremlin.

For our automaton we want to take a Gizmo doll and animate it so that it shows the three rules being broken. We are planning on mounting a Gizmo doll in front of a wall on to a platform that can rotate. We will then be using pulleys and wires to make Gizmo pull his hands over his eyes when a camera flash goes off in front of him. When Gizmo gets wet he will lie on the ground and balls of cotton will pop off of his back. If fed after a certain time frame, say 5 minutes, Gizmo will turn into a gremlin. This will be accomplished by rotating the platform to reveal a gremlin on the other side of the wall. This is similar to an old magic trick to replace one object with another.

Our automaton will be musical in nature, consisting of a set of percussion instruments with which the user can interact. Our ultimate goal is to allow the user to play the instruments directly, using sensors to determine which instrument was struck at what time, and then have the automaton play back a slightly modified version of what the user played (sort of like a call-and-response sequence in jazz). All of the instruments will be mounted on a single structure, creating a kind of "one man band" appearance.

Sensor nodes will mainly serve two purposes: 1) sensing when the user has struck an instrument, and 2) controlling the motors that allow the instruments to play themselves automatically. In the simplest case, each sensor would act independent of the others, simply playing back the user's rhythm after a preset length of time. A more sophisticated approach would involve networking the sensors so that they could collaborate on the sequence that is to be played back. One further advancement would be to use wireless communication to send all the sensor readings to a PC, which could act as a central controller to devise a new rhythm, then broadcast the necessary commands back to the sensor nodes.

We plan to build a maze which will be run through by a mouse. The maze will either be made out of balsa wood or simply be drawn on paper with a heavy black marker. The movement of the mouse will be controlled by two motor-driven gears, mounted together, which will travel along a pair of racks. One rack will allow for movement in both horizontal directions and the other will allow for movement in the vertical directions. Both of the racks will travel along guide rails. The guide rails allow the rack to move perpendicular to the direction of motion it provides. Attached to the motor assembly will be a magnet which will travel just underneath the paper and will move a mouse with another magnet inside of it across the floor of the maze.

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