Dave's Werld

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

Well, sometimes repetition is the key to a piece and sometimes repetition is the key to not finishing  a piece. I’m planning to do quite a few of these little houses. This is the first 30 or so and it gets boring quickly.  These are all cast alumimum and that part is kind of cool. I’ll try to take some pictures of the process as I do the next batch. This is the part of the casting process that you feel like you are almost done and yet you aren’t. This first picture is two sets of 4 houses on their sprues and casting cup attached.

Generica houses on pouring cups

After cutting them off the sprues, they look something like this…

Generica houses ready to grind

I have to grind those sprue remnants off of the tops and then polish the aluminum with various grits of sandpaper. Eventually these will all find their way onto a piece that I hope to show early next year. I’ll post some updates as they come along.

Zodiac is done and installed. The premise of Zodiac is that I was asked by the Oceanside Museum of Art to make a display of the various zodiac symbols as a decor item for a show called “The Zodiac Lounge”.  That’s why below I did the shift registers to control a whole bunch of outputs. The original idea was a display that would cycle through lighting LEDs representing all the star arrangements. Well I wouldn’t know one from another on a star chart and I’m thinking most people wouldn’t. So… Zodiac became a new way to communicate with old ideas. I’m using light and sound to make morse code symbols. So the LEDs light up to make dashes and dots while the music is also written to incorporate morse code.  I made the piece out of cold rolled steel and powder coated it silver on the outside and flat black on the inside. There is a curved panel of smoky plexiglass in front of all those light pipes. Here’s what the back of  the design looks like.

Back of the box showing electronics and light pipes

Zodiac installation

For those of you who like to know a story has a happy ending,  here it is installed in OMA.

Proverb Generator Front View

I’m really happy with how it all went together. Learned a bit about plastic fabrication and that’s a nice benefit. The console is a separate item and bolts onto the main cabinet to give me good access to the thinking part of this piece. Here’s how that all worked out.

Electronics for Proverb Generator

The way this whole piece works is that I found that most proverbs are largely “IF:THEN” statements. IF you do this or this occurs, THEN this event is the outcome. Well, I don’t like predictions that much and I certainly have found that I like slightly twisting words to make things funny. So the one LCD on the machine has all the first halves of 20 some familiar proverbs. The other LCD has 20 conclusions. When you press the start button, the proverbs circulate on the LCDs, you press the red buttons and choose your proverb. Some of them get to make sense, some of them are nonsense, some of them work grammatically, some don’t.  This one suggests that the early bird shouldn’t throw stones.  I can’t argue against that.

Sample proverb generated