After designing the mechanical Pookkalam, I wanted to push the boundaries of expanding mechanisms further. My original design utilized a single circular expanding iris that was geometrically bounded and difficult to tile across a larger canvas.
I searched for patterns capable of infinite planar tiling and arrived at a hexagonal tessellation. The primary engineering hurdle was mechanical synchronization: as you scale the pattern outward from the center, each secondary control loop increases in radius while requiring an identical RPM to prevent binding.