Dave's Werld

Been a bit since the last update. I have been traveling to Europe. That’s always a favorite thing to do. So, I’m back and recharged.

Generica needs lights to work and I designed a very nice little board to do that. But then I happened onto a designed board that was cheaper than I could even fabricate the PCB for. It’s addressable by a micro and I’m using an Arduino, for something new. I also bought some Picaxe controllers to see how those are too.

Here’s the LEDs on a 1m strip.

LED strip lighted

 I also designed a little board to use a touch switch controller. Here’s that one:

Touch switch to Basic Stamp. My board is the little one in the bottom of the page,

Samuel Robert 1999-2012.

Sam fell into our lives literally. He was a little lost doggie and we took him in. Like all good dogs, he brought more to us than we ever did to him. Sam had his way about him. He was so gentle he took food with his lips. He never knew he wasn’t a golden retriever and he won’t ever think he wasn’t. He’s in green fields with lots of mouses to chase because that was his favorite thing to do. That’s what I would like to think.

You could stay home and read that book you got for Christmas that you have no interest in.

You could watch reruns of Gilligan’s island.

You could rearrange your sock drawer.

Or….

You could come to Oceanside Museum of Art and their Art After Dark party where Circle of Complication is one of the featured pieces.

http://www.oma-online.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=18&Itemid=180

Still making… I had bought a conveyor belt from a company for this piece a while ago, but I think I don’t like it. So in the usual style of making the simple complex because of some imagined aesthetic… I am designing a conveyor I like better. The schematic was designed early in the week and thanks to one of my buddies, the circuit board looks very nice. I have to send that out for fabrication and I’ll post it too.

Pieces waiting to be assembled

 

Glass houses, well Plexiglass

 

12 VDC motor mounted

 

It's a conveyor...

Only a test. Of the new WordPress software.

I learned tonight why a written diary is better than an electronic one. The written one doesn’t need a help line in, well, wherever GoDaddy’s help line is at.

But after killing an evening at the computer, it would appear I am back in the saddle again.

Latest piece waiting for a blog entry. The last one crashed WordPress

So yeah, I admit some of my titles leave a bit to be desired. That seems to be where the engineer side of me comes in and does whatever engineer sides do. You wind up with short little titles that simply describe the piece in literal terms. Of course if I was really breaking out my engineer, I’d title pieces in a very methodical way. So.. until this piece gets a title that I am happy with… it’s going to be 2012,January, A.

I’m interested in the part contributing to the whole. I’m interested in the effects of a thing on it’s immediate surroundings. I’m interested in the long term effects of anything doing anything. It seems that any minor motion would affect a change on the whole system no matter how small or how difficult to measure that effect would be. I’ll leave this to you to decide, but a guy named Schrodinger had some thoughts about it. Cat lovers may not like his plan though. Well, sort of.

So. Without further complications and discussions, here’s what is going on; I have a kinetic sculpture about 4 feet high. It’s acrylic, steel and wood. I love those things. Wood is the most sensual building material I can think of. Metal and I have been friends for some time. Acrylic/plastic is the new kid on the block, but we are really playing well in the sandbox together, so to speak. Of course there’s some electronics too.

Once the piece is approached, there is a simple switch that you are invited to press. This will change for the final piece to be a touch switch, this is just to get the proportions correct. The switch operates a nifty little servo motor that drives a circle that picks up a single steel sphere and places it into a tube. The sphere rolls through the tube and free falls into a baffle that deflects it into a large tube and then it falls into a small pool of water. When it does it, lights a single light in the pool. The light slowly fades as the ripples of the dropping sphere also subside. I’d like to make the pool larger, but for now, it’s a smaller piece.

Overview of design

Apparently my studio assistants want to go outside and play ball. So, I guess I better had.

Mr M suggesting that beautiful days are for enjoying. Outside.

But now I fear the light.

How I got to this piece is through a person I recently met who does these amazing cutout pieces of art.  Check it out, it’s neat. http://www.bhavnamehta.com/madhu-modern-woman-stories.html

So, there’s something coming relating to her cutouts, but for the moment, my premise is anything looming over you is a bit disturbing. Even a simple sheep if it’s large and covering you, might make you step back. So, my sheep ( who seem to get around ) are the focus of a piece that will be done soon. In the meantime, I needed to prove out a linear slide that I made from some neat new mechanical stuff. I’m still learning it, but I think we are going to see a lot more of my pieces framed with it. Other details on the slide… it’s got a continuous rotation servo, two touch switches and my parallax basic stamp breakout board.

Here’s what the slide looks like.

Overview of slide and electronics

The sheep are laser cut acrylic which will mount to the slide above.

The aforementioned sheep out of laser cut acrylic

It takes a little to upload and you get no feedback while it is loading.  Sometimes with computers you just have to believe they are doing something….

Complete piece video

Detail of marble rolling video

Something has always fascinated me about the myth of Sisyphus. Somehow he was forced to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down before he would reach the top of the hill. Of course, he would get right back to rolling that rock up the hill, completely ignoring that the thing would likely roll over on him again.  You can draw your own conclusions about Sisyphus.

So with those pleasantries behind us. I decided that I couldn’t easily make a boulder roll up a hill forever, but I could make a ball roll forever, or at least as long as most people would be willing to watch it roll. Then I thought, maybe our protaganist only rolled that boulder when Zeus was watching and pretty much did nothing when the watchful eyes weren’t upon him. My “boulder ” only rolls when you are standing in front of it to make it roll.

laser cut acrylic and hardware

I was initially planning on using a continous rotation servo, but I modified a standard rotation servo to be continuous and put a L293D driver in it so it’s really a standard DC motor in a servo package. Why? Because I have laser cut servo brackets I designed for other things, but no nifty DC motor brackets. Yet. It’s also a simple enough design that for once I don’t have a controller doing anything, so switching DC is simple with a switch. A servo would require some smarts.

Fit check for basic design

Internal gearing with paper peeled back on motor

There were a few design issues that popped up, but all were resolved without too many curse words or feeling too much like Sisyphus myself.  After that, we got to this point…

Completed assembly waiting for a boulder

Completed piece with rolling boulder

Video of the boulder doing it’s thing is in the post above.

It’s official. Plastic is my new favorite medium. At least until I fall back in love with wood, metal or something else again. I had a studio visit a couple months back from a local museum, which sadly is closing it’s doors.

I created a new piece to be shown in this museum where I drop a single sphere into a large pool of water based on the movement of the viewer. I decided on a vertical version of the same method gumball machines use.

Mechanism to pick out one sphere from a groupSide view of mechanism

Mechanism from the side