Dave's Werld

Ok, most of you know this already, but.. the next show is at Sushi Performance Gallery in downtown San Diego.  I’m very happy to be showing there, it’s a great venue and some excellent artists have been there and will be there in the future. It’s hard for me to imagine being in the same venue as some of the people, but suffice it to say, I’m really honored and happy about it. The piece I am showing is the Circle of Complication piece. This is the first time it will be shown and I’m really happy with how it works. I’m also happy with how much I can play with it over the coming months. My good friend Brian came over last night to photo the piece and as usual, his photography is perfect. Here’s what he shot.

Circle of Complication in work

And he also did a nifty little detail that he sent.

Circle pen holders.

And one of it moving along…

Circle in motion

So.. please consider this as an invite to Sushi next Friday, from 6 to 9 PM and the circle will be spinning and drawing.

http://sushiart.org/

Circle has taught me so much. I still like the piece and what it does, but I am honestly looking forward to looking back. This piece had every unknown issue come up and require attention. Today was a few of them, from the level translators on the microcontroller board causing me an issue to the needing a separate battery circuit for the stepper. 

Basic operation is good. It is doing what it’s supposed to. Mostly. Here’s a video of the main trolley swinging back and forth.Circle trolley video

It’s a maze of wires and things right now, but here’s a picture of the control arm so you can see most of what’s happening.

Circle Armature

Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening and then everything does. Circle has been a constant source of learning, design and testing. Finally I am at a point where the frame, base and arm all could be put together. My friend Jorge has done an amazing job with the metal work. He has taught me so much about working with metal and really made this whole project a nice time. We have spent a lot of time working on it and had a lot of fun.  These photos don’t even tell the story of all the design work that occurred on this project. The bracket for the two servo motors is still in work, but that will bolt on this weekend and I will be testing software all weekend.

Circle main view

Detail of colors

Well.. It’s certainly living up to the name… circle of complications has been a design challenge. We started working last week and felt that we were on a good path of completion and thought today would be about a four hour day. Here’s our day start..

Circle of Complication frame

At the end of a long day, with various design pitfalls along the way and usually a lot of discussion, head scratching and then laughing , we have something that looks a lot like what it should look like.

Circle mostly done

There’s a some detail left to the imagination here. Imagine all the things on the table, not there and instead the nice birch wooden drawing surface in place. The arm is basically complete, all that’s left is to weld the tray on that holds the electronics, battery and the pens. Then to powder coating and then final assembly. The software will still need some work, but mostly to refine and such. There also may be some limit switches mounted on the arm assembly.

Detail of arm assembly

Well… Circle of Complication is in full design/debug. Turns out it was named correctly. I’m learning things about motors I would rather have had not. The final design of this piece has one stepper motor, one DC motor and two servo motors. The stepper motor has turned out to be quite a little riddle to solve. I’ll spare everyone the details on that one, but I had some issues that really took work to solve.

Main board and stepper driver

DC drive motor and two servos

Stepper motor on mount

Main arm with actuator and DC drive motor in layout

That last photo is the linear actuator on a board that I drew a 1″x1″ grid on for layout. The blue wheel on the top left is the main drive wheel. The stepper motor mounts on this linear actuator to slide the pens back and forth on the arm. As the drive wheel turns the whole arm, the actuator goes in and out, changing the effective drawing radius. I can also control the servo motors which are what hold the pens and actually make the drawing.  The overall arm swing is about 30″ so the base will be 60″x60″ wide. This is a big piece.

Fabrication of the mechanical portion starts this Tuesday.  Will post pictures soon.

Interview at Oceanside Museum of Art

The upcoming show at Art Produce is something I am really looking forward to.  The final piece will have a zen garden have a bed about 3 feet by 4 feet. This one is much smaller, but I really wanted to see it in operation. The design is pretty much the same for whatever size I make it. How this one goes is that you have as long as you want to draw in the sand. You can make design after design. However, when you stop and pull your hand away, the entire pan vibrates away all the traces of what you drew. I’ll post the electronics in another post a little later.  Click on the link to open the video.

Sands of Time

Remember the Spirograph toy from long ago? Turns out that the simple toy is governed by math. It’s always math. The equations aren’t that important here but you can search for hypotrochoid and epitrochoid and see the proof. I’m interested in the spontaneous discovery of childhood and certainly like the simplicity. Sometimes we use technology to do things that work just fine in the old ways. As if a plastic toy from the sixties is an old way, but you get my point.

Circle of Complication addresses that and makes some interesting remnants as well.  A microcontroller is used to control two servo motors. One servo motor is used to propel the arm around the center, creating arcs. The other servo is used to wave back and forth to give some visual interest to the arcs.  This isn’t the final design, this is kind of a very nice prototype to iron out some design issues. The final piece will be larger about 5 feet by 5 feet drawing on 4 foot by 4 foot paper. It will use a linear actuator to move the pens back and forth and may have more than one pen depending on how I design it.

Of course there’s always the woodworking. Here’s the base which is fun because it comes apart and packs flat.

Circle of Complication base

This all assembles with the drawing platform on it to look something like….

Circle of Complication assembly

A close up shot of the drawing arm while it’s drawing.

Circle of Complication Drawing arm

A short video of circle drawing arcs. That’s my studio assistant Baloo making sure it’s working.

Circle of Complication video

So the next piece I need to control some video. The controller I have been using is really nice for very simple tasks, but certainly has some limits.  This new little controller is pretty excellent. So far it does what it says it would do and that’s pretty nice for me since my software skills can really use some improvement. Here’s a picture of all I really needed to output to a VGA monitor.

Microcontroller with VGA output

VGA text on monitor from microcontroller

Here’s a better picture… video is coming soon too.

Zodiac