Solar Engine

So,...

I ordered some components to make a Solar engine which can be used in a BEAM bot. I wanted to have a solar cell, and I wanted to have all the components ready to make a Solar engine. This so I can experiment later with components that I will scavenge from old electronics.

I finally got it (actually I got them pretty quickly..) and I put all the components on my breadboard right away.

And it works! First I had some troubles finding out how to put the FLED (Flashing LED) because it worked both ways :). But finally after some research I found out that it was placed the right way on the first time, so yay me! :).

I only used it in my room so far and I found out that it only works when it is exposed to direct sunlight. This is behind a window. This gave me the idea to create a sun chime, that reacts to the sunlight instead of a wind chime that reacts to the wind. But I need to see how I can best do this.

Also a room mate right away thought it might be useful in his window garden, because the more the sun shines, the more the plants need water. So if this thing pumps water when the sun shines, the plants will be taken care of! :) I need to see If this is possible to do! :) for my own mint plant that still isn't really doing well..

The 'Love' processing sketch is coming along bit by bit. Last time I worked on it I found out that I really need to work out how to create a good gravity system. but I have some good ideas so hopefully I can make that this weekend. And then I can post a little sketch with 2 points. which will later evolve into a bigger system.

Take care, have a nice weekend and see you next week!

frank

Back again!

Soo,... It's been a long time now since my last post, 3 to 4 weeks i guess..

There are a couple of reasons for this: First one is that I'm working on a processing sketch that I wanted to finish before showing or uploading it. It is a continuation of the sketches that I showed earlier but Now with an interaction between the points when they come close to each other. The sketch is called "Love" and it is supposed to be a kind of dance between the points.

Here I have some sketches of the the notes and calculations I made so far:

It is a nice process to keep track of and I hope that I will finish it soon and maybe develop it further.

Another reason for not having posted anything is that I didn't have that much time anymore, I found a job! I now work in the storage of IKEA in the early morning, so I still have time in the afternoon to do stuff. But I find that or I'm to tired to really work on it, or the day is just to short to do everything I'd like to do. But there is a good side on this, I make some money! making my budget a bit bigger and hopefully allowing me to do a bit more awesome stuff :).

And the last, but certainly not least, reason is Zsennye. Zsennye is a small village in Hungary where there is an annual design workshop. And I was there, together with Aurora and Tine, a friend of Aurora. It was a week long and filled with lunch, lectures and time to work on a design assignment together with your team.
I was in a group called Functure and we were trying to design intelligent furniture. Either the design or the product itself is intelligent, it didn't matter. And it was a lot of fun! Our mentor was Tibor Szentpéteri a designer which was now designing for about 40 years in Hungary and had a lot of experience and knowledge. It was really interesting to talk with him about the history of design and also how it is now and a little bit about where it might be going.

A couple of thing followed from this workshop, firstly I got some inspiration back And above all: motivation to start on my graduation project, which I was kind of lacking in...

Tibor had a book with him, actually a lot of them (I neeeeeeeed more books, boooks are awesome!!!), and one of them was a book that I already wanted to buy, Digital by Design by Troika. It contains all sorts of awesome projects and products. And one of them are the Helioforms:

These are small robots that react on light and can light some LEDs when it is dark. Maybe not that amazing, but it is done with just a couple of simple electronical elements. They are part of BEAM robots. And strangely enough I already knew these robots, when I was about 12 years old I saw a documentary about robots on Discovery Channel and this was a small part of it. I never found it again, but now I saw it and found it finally! :)

Okay, so of course now I want to make them too. So I already scrambled a bit and I found two capacitors and one transistor, So I hope I can use them. I also got my housemates lighting struck computer, to get more components.

 I'm thinking of some robots to make, but more importantly I think I can make a small sungreeter in a very low cost way, instead of using Arduino. So I hope I can make it and then create cooler things with these robot like things...
I also already bought a new light from HEMA which uses LED! and can give me a better look at the components, hopefully.

The last, or one of the last, good things from Zsennye is this:

 It was an experiment (I think) of one of the other groups in a psychological or philosophical way. But it uses a shell of a snail and some dead plants to create a new kind of snail. And I really like it, I think I can make this into a BEAM bot :). I hope :)

Anyway, this is enough for now,

until next time!

frank

Processing goodness.

Hey :)

Last time I linked to a website of Jared Tarbell, and I've been looking at it for a long time. So I decided to start my own sketches that act a bit similar.

The first one is just an experiment to let 5 dots fly over the landscape and leave a trace. These dots make a circular movement around the middle of sketch. And every step they set a dot, and slowly but surely the screen fills up and and most of the time it creates something nice. (takes about 5 to 10 mintes.)

So I decided to go on with this experiment. But what I really wanted to create are dots that move around the middle of the sketch like there is some sort of gravity. This took some experimenting but eventually it worked. I also decided that they should have some sort of tail, so instead of just a dot it creates some sort of spray.

I really liked this movement so I wanted to see how the dots move according to each other, actually I just wanted to have a cool effect of connecting the lines. So I let every dot see if there is a dot a certain distance away and if it is close enough make a line.

Something that I found out is that what it leaves is really nice to look at, so If you click the sketch it will show something really nice :).

But then I got bored... but Aurora decided to move on and experiment a little further (click this one too!):

She made the dots move almost straight, changed the colours, and the distance when the lines would connect.

So that was the little processing goodness.

Now, you might think that I've forgotten all about Arduino, but fret not! I have a new project in mind inspired by these two:

Noolanders

and

Schergen

So again something toyie, which I already wanted to do but now I might have a cooler Idea! :) So now I need to sketch, make, experiment, find out, burn my fingers and make it better! :D YAY!

cheers!

frank

Longboard, processing, java and ...

Okay,

So first of all I kind of finished my Longboard! Aurora still had this beauty lying around at her parents house:

She told me I could use it to test the longboard until I have some money to buy my own trucks and wheels! So now I just took these:

So I drilled some holes where I thought they needed to be and I screwed on the Back wheels:

and the Front wheels:

So now it was time to test it, First a picture of the longboard as it isn't used, but enjoying it's first sunlight!

So then I had to test it and take pictures of course:

So all in all it kind of worked well. The wheels aren't really good so with one stroke you'll get about 10 meters, but it works well on the tarmac, really smooth. The deck bends a little too much, if you bounce a little the deck can hit the ground.... So I hope Aurora can maybe use it, maybe with some slight adjustments, like making it shorter...

So Now I need to wait till I have some Money and I can buy some wheels!!!! :)

I also progressed with Processing, though not really showable... I learned how to put text in a sketch and how to transform stuff... but I haven't really used it in an experiment, So I'll get back to that.

And I also found the sketch that got me into Processing in the first place:

Sketch site (You can chose the resolution!)

This guy has an awesome collection of sketches that are really good, and he also shows the source code so I hope I will learn a lot from him :)

I also started to learn Java, but again I can't show anything yet since the first Chapter was about why Java was developed, how it works and to make a little program that says "Hello World!" in Command prompt.... So that isn't really something to show off... but maybe later I will be able to show some stuff!

In the last Post I said that I wanted to write down some lessons that I learned about Designing, or which might help me, and to make awesome posters of these.... But I went ahead and I made a poster about this blog. The main thing that I wanted to be able to do with Arduino was to kind of create things that acted or seemed alive. So my first Poster is to remind me about that:

And that was it for this time,

Cheers!

frank

Processing sweetness...

Hey...

In terms of having no money I just used Electricity (and Internet) to go on with learning. I set my self a goal: create something similar as Casey Reas awesomeness! This would let me learn to make objects (which I already know a bit but can definetly be improved!), read the distance, let objects interact, and apply behavioral rules to objects. wooooooh :)

So to do this I opened Processing, and was already enticed by the opening screen showing kind of what I want to create:

wooooh :)

Okay so I started out trying out the dist() function between the middel of the screen and the mouse position. And I mapped this relation with the brightness of the lines:

So that was nice eh? But this isn't really what I wanted to get So I replaced the mouse by a simple dot that moves around and creates a line:

But then the middle is still the main point of it all, So now I created multiple objects (moving a bit randomly) that test each others distance:

THis is just a little beginning. Now I need to learn to create vectors and how to play with them and let the objects really interact with each other! :)

ah well, see you soon!

Frank

processing, longboard and the guidelines

Hi there!

Last night I had this thing in my head and I needed to make it:

It's a quadrilateral, a four sided polygon, which corners change every cycle and outline changes colour. You probably won't believe how long it took me to get this right, because I wanted the colours to change into one another smoothly. But the sinus gave me lots of troubles! After a while I even decided to plot the sinus function in the sketch to see if it was right, and after some slight alterations it became right :) It had something to do with the syntax....:

After showing it to a roommate he thought it would be cool to make it look like a view on a pyramid! So we tried it out:

This was also easy to do. And fun to see the effect :). but after lunch I thought I might be better to make it a bit slower and to make it move a little nicer. So now per cycle only one corner moves and has a delay of 10 miliseconds... :

Nicer eh?

anyway this was just for fun, I think I will have lots of fun this holiday on working on newer and cooller things :).

I also worked on my longboard! Because Last picture I showed it was still under a few kilos of sand and a wooden shoe! (how Dutch! :) ) But after this stage I needed to saw it, here was my set up:

Everything went fine! except that I don't really have carpenters hands so the lines aren't that straight, so don't be surprised I you find a few bumps :) :

I also needed to sand it to get some nice edges on which you can't cut your hands:

So now the deck is almost complete! I can stand on it (I tried it with books instead of wheels :) ) and it only bends a little negative, But Aurora can stand on it and it remains flat! :) So it will probably become her longboard :).

The only thing that I found was at the tail the two layers of wood didn't connect that well, and you see a gap in the epoxy:

I don't think it is to bad because I'm sure that there is epoxy in between, but still it isn't really nice yet...

So now I need to buy truck, bearings and wheels, but my research has shown that that will amount to about 130 Euros, which, incidentally, I don't have :( so I still need to wait until I can use it.

Which sucks.... But When I have the money I will make an awesome video :D and another one I think :) that is better fitted to my weight :)

Another thing that I want to do is to create 10 posters of things that I learned about designing. I want to do it in the style of this tutorial of computerarts.co.uk and I think it will be cool, but first I need to find out what I have learned :). But I think it is a good thing to do before I start my graduation project :).

So that was it for now,

See you next week!

frank

beginning of a Longboard and paper models

So last weekend there was a festival in Delft called 'Gemaakt' ('Made' in English). It was a festival with all kinds of awesome projects shown to the public. Aurora also participated with her Rewind Memetics project, But I'll get to that some other time. Another cool thing there was Durkes, these guys make longboards out of bamboo and glassfibers.

After riding a bit on them and asking them all sorts of questions I decided I wanted to make my own longboard! It would get me working with wood again, let me bend wood! Make me use Epoxy again, and also just lets me experiment with something new again. So all in all a perfect summer project :).

I found this website made by toothless that describes a very basic way of making a longboard with plywood and epoxy, nothing else! So I wanted to make one like this.

First I bought me some Wood. Birch plywood of the best quality. And cut it in two:

After deciding which is going to be the top and which the bottom I started to make the markings on the bottom one:

Then on one half of the board I put paper to draw the shape on. Aurora helped me with some other papers to let me get the perfect shape:

Then I had to cut away the excess paper, in order for me draw the line on the wood:

And then I drew the shape on the wood, flipped the paper and also drew the shape on the other side of the board:

Later I added marks where I would drill. The holes that are going to be made here will make it easier to screw both sides of plywood to each other when applying epoxy:

And I drilled the holes into them:

close up :) :

Later I went to my parents place (because of powertools) And put the epoxy on both plywood boards and put them on top of each other. Added weight to make a curve and put the screws in, to get rid of all the excess epoxy:

And a shot of the soon to be curve :) :

So, this afternoon I will start to start to saw the shape of the board out and sand the whole thing.

I already found out some things that I'll do differently when building another board: First of all make sure that the whole floor is covered with paper, I did most of the floor but didn't do the exactly every part of the floor so now we have an epoxy floor.

Another thing that I learned from a friend just now is that I should have used film because Epoxy doesn't attach to that, I didn't use it and now there is a high probability that my board is glued to the steps on which it's leaning. Which would suck.

Put the screws in first, in only the first board, and then put epoxy on and put the two boards together. Most of my time was spent hurrying to put all the screws in the wholes and then screwing them in. If they were already partly in it would have gone so much faster.

Lastly the use of glue clamps would have helped a lot. Putting the screws in didn't go perfectly as they sometimes pushed the lower board a little away creating a gap between the two boards which I didn't want. Having had clamps would probably reduced this.

Any way I also would show some pictures of some paper models that I made!

So first of all the lucky pig that I gave my mother for mothers day, it was inspired by a tutorial of computerarts.co.uk:

For my dad I made a bear for fathers day:

And for my brother I also made one for his very first day on his very first real job:

And that was it!

hopefully I'll show you a picture of a finished longboard :) !

cheers!

Frank