I've been intrigued by gears and other forms of tangible mechanics and I'm hoping to start exploring these for my Independent study this semester.
Laser cutting at the Xfab studio is super cheap so I'm thinking just finding wooden scraps and cutting out various sizes of gears so I can modular-ly use them and make interchangeble mechanics that can be used with arduino/computer-vision/sound.
I did a first attempt at making a wooden slider today:
The gears are offset farther than ideal so the actual slider is very loose. Though this was the first time I used the laser cutters, so I'm quite happy I got something out of it. Now just gotta commit to this, iterate and build on top of this and see where it goes.