The title might sound like an obfuscated way of saying "trick of the light",
but actually it has a more precise meaning. "Enigma" is a reference to the
famed German code-making machine which you may or may not have heard of.
I don't know if any of your know how this gizmo works... (I live just miles
away from the legendary "Bletchley Park" where the British decoded Enigma -
and allegedly built the world's first electronic computer.) To put it
simply, the thing has a keyboard, and a set of 26 lamps. It also has 3
wheels. 26 wires go into each wheel, and 26 come out the other side. But in
between is a maze of wire.
Well anyway, instead of a maze of wire with invisible electric current
flowing through it, I thought it would be fun to have a maze of mirrors with
laser beams running round it - so you can actually see what's going on! The
two images I've posted represent as much of the thing as I've built so far -
it's nowhere near finished yet!
The keyboard was fairly easy to do (yes, I *know* it has 27 keys!) The idea
is that a laser runs round under the keys, and when you press one down, the
mirror on the bottom breaks the beam and reflects it downwards. (Still have
to build a thingy to get it from keyboard to wheels.)
The wheels were very hard to do. It took me ages to figure out how to line
up the mirrors properly! Initially I tried to do the whole thing using
cylindrical lights and scattering media... But it didn't work! The beam hits
the mirror, but doesn't continue. So now I'm using emission in the interiors
of explicitly placed cylinders - which renders a tad faster!
Ideas? Comments? Experts? ;-)
Andrew.
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Preview of image 'Keyboard3.png'
Preview of image 'TestRing1.png'
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