Giant Kinetic Praying Mantis Sculpture from found materials

Step 7 Electrical system

The only truly off-the-shelf part that went into this project was a little timing relay. In years of building kinetic sculpture I have learned that people cannot be expected to understand that they have to turn something off when they are done with it. To preserve the life expectancy of these pieces I came up with a system (with a great deal of help from my friend CTP) where the viewer presses a button to activate the motors. The piece runs for a few moments and then turns itself off. While this system is relatively very simple, it adds to the complexity of the final wiring. Since I am an artist and have no training in electrical engineering I have had to come up with a notebook full of "maps" of how to put different systems together. I have included a scan of the basic design which went into this piece as well as the relevant parts numbers for different suppliers of this particular relay.