Some tourist attractions have those machines where you stick a penny and 4 quarters in and it squishes the penny into a medallion with an imprint of the Golden Gate Bridge or something as a souvenir.

I think the same idea applied to paper money would be even cooler. Have a machine that folds the dollar, pound note etc. into some location specific trinket like the Eiffel Tower or the Sidney Opera House. I’m pretty sure you can make anything out of origami. It would also be more exciting to watch than a penny being squished.

You could also just stick the dollar back out and say it’s an origami surf board.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 06 2007

(?) Finished products. http://members.cox.net/crandall11/money/
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Nov 07 2007]

Crowd Sourcing : Origami Folding Machine http://www.bizorigi...ami-folding-machine
Hey, you are famous! [baconbrain, Nov 08 2007]

//A lady, shirley?// (Halfbaked) Halfbakeria
Inspired by [jtp] [theleopard, Nov 09 2007]

WOW! http://ericjoisel.com/Site/animals.html
I think this guy would be the one to program any origami machine. [doctorremulac3, Nov 11 2007]

And how will your machine attempt the art of origami? As far as I know, cheap machines that can make origami out of possibly damaged bills aren't very easy to make. Or possible, for that matter.
-- Shadow Phoenix, Nov 06 2007


//And how will your machine attempt the art of origami?//

Well, an envelope is made by a machine and that's a kind of origami. Paper boxes, same thing. Shirts are folded by machine before they're sold. Those are simpler folding jobs but the concepts could be expanded on for more complicated designs.

It could be as simple as two or three molds pressing the bill into shape and creasing it for the various stages. It would be a fun challenge but not impossible. We put a man on the moon, we can certainly figure out how to have a machine fold a dollar bill into the statue of liberty.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 06 2007


Put in a fiver, get a folded single in return.
-- nuclear hobo, Nov 07 2007


Making origami boulders is pretty simple.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 07 2007


+ I think it's a cool idea. As kids we used to make paper chains from gum wrappers, I'd like to have some of those made of money, too. Then one could just peel one off and spend it.
-- xandram, Nov 07 2007


Why have the machine when you can just sell pre-folded notes brand new from a suvenear shop?
-- xxobot, Nov 08 2007


// pound note // hehe.

Nice idea, it would make the cash gifts that grannies give you more exciting. It could even be done with gift vouchers.

I challenge you all to create a Lego Mindstorms robot capable of this.
-- marklar, Nov 08 2007


//Why have the machine when you can just sell pre-folded notes brand new from a suvenear shop?//

The fun part would be watching the machine fold it. Manufacturing machines are like some kind of mechanical ballet.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 08 2007


'Ere's a Fiver; I'll 'ave a pony, or a monkey, guv.
-- Ling, Nov 08 2007


A lady, shirley?
-- jtp, Nov 08 2007


As someone who's done a lot of origami, and has folded dollar bill models, I believe that to make such a machine would be quite a feet indeed. This thing would require many diferently angled rollers and plates, for increasing levels of thickness. It is would require crisp new bills, and I mean crisper than most of the bills you could get through a change machine at the laundremat. The origami dollar machine would need a stock of bills to use. This thing would be very hard to maintain, because the more complicated a machine is, the more that can go wrong with it, and I can just imagine a great many paper jam ups, causing a great deal of downtime.
-- -wess, Nov 08 2007


{wess] Sp. 'feat'

Agreed. The Crane requires a pretty complex manoeuvre that entails making a series of folds and then selecting and inverting a single layer of paper from them, a move that is dependent on the flexibility of both the paper and the tools (fingers) used to manipulate it. Maybe a combination of vacuum clamping and directed air blasting ... an interesting design problem.
-- nuclear hobo, Nov 08 2007


Neat link, neat idea, I'd love it.
-- blissmiss, Nov 08 2007


<Googles "Origami Folding Machine"> There's an Japanese gent who made a machine to fold a triangle onto the end of a roll of toilet paper. It took him a lot of time and effort to do so.

There's a paper with the abstract, "Origami, the human art of paper sculpture, is a fresh challenge for the field of robotic manipulation, and provides a concrete example for many difficult and general manipulation problems. This paper presents some initial results, including the world's first origami-folding robot, definition of a simple class of origami for which we have designed a complete automatic planner, an analysis of the kinematics of more complicated folds, and some new theorems about foldability."

Which is to say that this idea is a lot harder to put into practice than you might think. It's a neat wish, but not halfway to reality.

Money origami isn't new, nor is the thought of an origami robot. A robot is going to have real problems folding wrinkly old bills, as was noted above. None of the issues that would be involved are addressed here.

It might be fun to try out this idea with a human origamist with a few crisp bills on a table at a tourist spot. Has anybody seen that happening? If so, it might indicate a market for origami souvenirs. [ ]
-- baconbrain, Nov 08 2007


Sorry to be cynical... but I reckon watching a Chinaman folding origami at lighting fast speed is much more fun than watching a machine do it.
-- xxobot, Nov 09 2007


//origami at lighting fast speed // I think they speed up the video.
-- po, Nov 09 2007


If you crushed, and folded up a vehicle, would the process be described as Carigami?
-- xenzag, Nov 09 2007


or four-on-the-floorigami?
-- -wess, Nov 09 2007


//Hey, you are famous!//

Neato! Always nice to see this site getting some press.

Thanks B
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 09 2007


I reckon [xxobot] has betrayed his or her formative era (reckoning at least decades ago) by use of the now-maligned term "Chinaman".
-- globaltourniquet, Nov 09 2007


Nono, you have me wrong, I think its cool... <starts digging his own hole to bury himself in> ANYONE folding origami at a fast rate is fun to watch, I just used 'Chinaman' as a stereotypical example, sorry if I offended anyone

[Edit]and besides, I'm not even that old ;)
-- xxobot, Nov 09 2007


machine doesn't need to fold the bill. just APPEAR to fold the bill.
-- bigattichouse, Nov 09 2007


AH! ok then, how about if the machine had a video screen showing footage of a robot (computer animated or someone in a costume?) folding a dollar origami model, placing it in a package, and dropping it down a shute? Then the machine can just dispence the pre-folded packaged bills. That would be much more practical. The maybe clear plastic package could even be printed with the name of the place.
-- -wess, Nov 09 2007


What I'd really like to see is two mechanical human style hands doing this. Sounds like a good challenge for the guys at MIT or Honda.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 10 2007


What bigattichouse said. Besides, the coin-pressing machines work by taking your quarters, and squishing a cent.

So this machine could simply take your five dollar bill and give you a pre-folded dollar bill back. Or if it did do the folding in front of you (which would be worth paying for, methinks) use its own supply of crisp notes.
-- DrCurry, Nov 12 2007


Well, you'd be paying for the show of watching the thing be folded. Crisp notes already in the machine would certainly be the expedient way to do it, a fiver gets you a folded one back, that sort of thing. But the most fun, whether it was possible or not, would be to give it something out of your wallet that it makes into a work of art right in front of your eyes. I suppose you could use a bill scanner like they do in other vending machines to spit out stuff that's not of origami quality.

I just know I'd pay for it. I'm a sucker for these kind of attractions. They had a coin operated plastic injection molding machine at Marine World when I was a kid that made a plastic dolphin in front of your eyes for a buck. It didn't work of course, but, well, I don't know what my point was. I like dolphins?

I'm going to bed now.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 12 2007


OKay, I like the idea, but with no explanation of how it works I must give a neutral vote
-- evilpenguin, Nov 12 2007


[doctorremulac3] They had those plastic injection molding machines back in '90 at "The Parrot Jungle" in Florida, too. They were working, so I used two of them, and made a cockatu and flamingo. It WAS cool too watch.However, a machine that actualy does dollar origami would be far to complex, and costly to maintain.

How about this: you look through a stereoscope viewer on the machine, and see a 3-d computer animation of robot hands folding the bill, placing it in a clear plastic box stamped in gold with the place name, and tossing it in your direction, it seems to fall in front of you. You then take your pre-packed folded bill out of the shute in the machine underneath. This way, you have the entertainment of the 3-d movie, and you folded dollar it the box. You could even give the machine stereo speakers for paper folding and robot sound effects ,or background music.
-- -wess, Nov 13 2007


Well, I think at the very least, you could have a 2 part mold squish the bill into something souveniery looking. Maybe not origami per se but you might be able to get something effective out of a simple mechanism like that.

At the very least, baconbrain's idea of somebody just doing this by hand setting up a little table at some tourist attraction would probably make some bucks though. Maybe 5 bucks gets you one back all folded up. Make 200 or 300 a day maybe. That's obviously not an invention though, just a footnote.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 13 2007


//machine doesn't need to fold the bill. just APPEAR to fold the bill// -[bigattichouse]

Truly zen. What is the sound of one machine folding?
-- shapu, Nov 13 2007


How about a dollar bill confetti machine? Easier than origami and if they cut up your bill slowly enough you can actually watch it being shredded. Fun!
-- phundug, Nov 13 2007


The topic of injection-molded plastic souvenirs has stirred my brain cells. Yes, yes, the misty clouds of my mind are parting to reveal a long ago memory of dropping coins into a machine to watch it dispense molten orange plastic into a die.

After an apparently too brief cooling period the die parted to reveal a somewhat mutated, bilious replica of Seattle's famed Space Needle. The mold had not received enough plastic to complete the base of the souvenir, and the plastic was still quite warm and kind of rubbery-soft. Being a naive yougster at the time and unaware of it's potential nostalgic value, I picked and picked at the misshapen egdes of the toy, as children are wont to do despite the rantings of their parents, until all I had left was the UFO-like top section. It remained in my toy collection until the following Halloween, when I, in order to save the planet from impending invasion by bilious orange aliens, blew it to smithereens with a couple of firecrackers.

It's interesting to me to hear that Mold-A-Rama machines are still around.

As for the origami folding machine, I would have to agree with the pre-folded concept. I think the best you could get from automated origami machine would be a tube or a fan. Or maybe a pyramid.
-- Canuck, Nov 13 2007



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