new stuff

hey,... it's been a while...

I'm finding that when you have holidays but don't know when they are going to stop, or when you need to begin again, you don't really have holidays. which is quite annoying and is actually making me a bit anxious. At the moment I'm searching for a graduation project to finish my master Design for Interaction. And it feels that I have to put all my time into this, as long as I don't have project yet. So no spare time for other things, which is quite stupid, I think, but the uncertainty is kind of killing me i guess...

Anyway for this blog it kind of means that I try to do things, but they aren't spare time anymore, it's just a planned activity... of sorts.. maybe it isn't but it is hard to start on it without feeling bad about it.

But enough talk and more images! yay!

These are two characters I made for my girlfriends birthday. The idea was that the blue character is a bit slow but strong and cheerful and that the yellowish one is sort of the brain and is actually steering the blue one. And together they travel around the world in search of adventures, or something, maybe a bit inspired by this:

This was a good exercise of trying to prototype something as I first needed to make some to figure out how to fold this and how to assembly them. the first folding one was pretty boxy (ok i know i still need to post a picture) and this one has all sorts of angles that I had to figure out, and still it didn't really end up perfect. But :) here is another picture of the two rascals :) :

To take better care of my plants i decided they need an automated watering system. So this is what I made: a Belgian beer bottle (filled with water (since the beer had magically disappeared)) with a string in it to transfer the water to the plant. And it actually works fine! the only problem is that it uses its water to fast so it will only last one day... but when I'm away for a weekend it is good :)

Lately I've been watching this video of Zimoun:

The DC motors with some sort of string attached reminded me of my old sun greeter. So I though it might be cool to rebuild it, in a new way, to resemble these DC motors of Zimoun.

So now it is just a bit strange that it is hold down with some blue tape, but it holds it quite well. It still just operates on a light sensor together with Arduino and a relay to switch 3V to the motor.

So this week i'm going to make it work and hopefully see if it works good. But I think the conclusion is going to be that it will make to much sound. Maybe I should do something with the speaker... ah well we will see :)

Another thing i've been working on is processing, I've continued a bit with the tutorials and now I learned the Object oriented programming. Not that I'm good at it, but I think I understand it. So now I will try to make some different sketches with it :). here is a screenshot :) :

So that was it, next week hopefully more of the folding beasts and animals :), about the sungreeter and Processing.

bye!