I still had the stuff from the presentation in my car today so at lunch I assembled the Harmonograph table for my co-workers to try out.  Although, I decided to focus on a very specific goal.  I wanted to create the most harmonious harmonograph images yet.

The way you create harmonious drawings is by matching the swing frequency between all of the pendulums.  The way you tune them is by either adding more or less weight or by lowering or raising the weights.  The lower the weight, the longer and slower the swing.  The higher the weight, the shorter and faster the swing.  That’s easy enough.  You can see them swinging in tune with each other but what about the rotation of the drawing surface?  How do you tune the rate of rotation of the drawing surface to the swing of a pendulum?

I basically attempted to eyeball it.  I got the pendulums working together and then, before dropping the pen, I turned on the rotation.  I tried to get it to spin at a rate so that every time the pen swung forward it was going towards a corner of the drawing surface.  It was pretty tough to juggle all of the elements at once.  I did, however, create some of the most harmonic, spiraling-harmonograph drawings yet.  None of them were perfect but some of them were very close.

Check out the examples above.  The first picture is an example of what you can create with matched swing-frequency but without rotation (pretty harmonious, eh?).  The rest of the examples are my attempts at tuning the rotation to the swing frequency.  The one at the bottom, in my opinion, is the closest one to a tuned swing and rotation.