mdemerchant

Unless you're going to mount the cube on its corner or hang it from something then it makes sense to me that you wouldn't want the bottom face to move. In that case it seems the mechanism could be pretty simple. Just put the motor at the bottom and have it drive a vertical axle that has a lift arm attached that's long enough to push out a side but short enough to be able to go around without hitting the cube edges. You could have multiple if you want to push more than one wall at a time. Basically a very simple take on the music box idea and you only need the top half of it. Use a ramp rotating on top of the axle to drive a vertical pusher for the top cube face. Since you have your very clever net construction your walls should already be springy, you just need to poke them with something periodically. Seems like it should work but I'm sure easier said than done. Also it would be very regular. You'd need multiple layers of pushers more like the music box above if you wanted it to look more random. Or maybe a coupler layers turning at different speeds on the same axle using a construction like a clock.

Hi, my name is Mike and I decided to finally create an account after reading the forum for about a year. I spent plenty of my earlier childhood playing with Lego but didn't continue as I got older. I've come back to it in the past few years as my children started to get small sets for birthday presents and then started to ask for big sets. I found it was quite fun helping them build their sets and building random things with them. 5 year-olds are easily impressed by daddy's building skills. My daughters are mainly into Friends and Disney Princesses so my selection of available system bricks is certainly colorful but of limited use for building say a UCS size X-wing or a working excavator which I would find more interesting. I have picked up several of the larger Technic sets released in the last few years so I now have enough of that to build most anything that comes to mind and that's where I spend most of my building time. Having a great looking model is cool but having a model that actually functions appeals to my engineering background. I do browse the Sci-fi and Star Wars forums from time to time as well as I really enjoy seeing the creations people come up with. Looking forward to participating in the forum.