a new etchant option

for the past year or so i have been etching my own PCB's. i have experimented and successfully mastered many Toner Transfer resist techniques where a reversal image is applied with heat and pressure. i have had the kind support from our printmakers who allow me to use their Edinburgh Etch tank to burn the boards. and they have been really spectacular, it gives me much pride to deliver a project module to the students with home-brewed PCB's to work upon. it brings it closer to home on multiple levels.

on friday, i was leading a seminar for my summer work group who are assisting my summer project (stay tuned). in the seminar i demonstrated the entire process: drawing a schematic, PCB layout,resist transfer, etching, and then soldering the project. our printmaking facility is shut down for the summer so i did an etch in a photo tray in the UWF FabLab. this was fine as i only needed about 5 boards and it was fresh FeCl so it went relatively quickly. it has spurred me to take the next leap for our lab and start an official 'chemistry' policy in the lab to make sure the students can follow my lead and make their own custom PCB's.

i began more etchant research as i prepare for the discussion i need to have with our Environmental Health and Safety officers. i am concerned with the protocols we will need to establish for material handling and storage. even though we will need to comply to material handling for the 'used etchant' supplies, it would be wonderful to find other processes that use less hazardous raw materials and etchants that will last long term to reduce the waste stream.

for sometime i have been aware of a Hydrochloric Acid (HCl) and Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) etchant that seems to have a long life according to the citizen scienctitst and nerdom around instructables.com. the anecdotal evidence suggests that it has a long life that actually increases etching ability as it is used and that it can be extended by adding more oxidizing reagent (H2O2) or simply bubbling air through the mixture to facilitate the oxidation. the reports are that enthusiasts are getting very long usage times reducing the amounts of materials they dispose of. this is fantastic because cupric solutions are highly toxic to the environment and biology. it has even been suggested that electroplating techniques could be used to reclaim a less soluble (less hazardous) and recyclable copper powder. other advantages of this style of etchant is that it doesn't have the horrid staining that is characteristic of FeCl. it will still wreak havoc on your stainless steel sink so you need to exercise caution.

in the past 48 hours, became aware of a small but growing number of individuals using household vinegar (or if you will acetic acid CH3COOH) and H2O2 plus a little salt (NaCl) as an etchant. this well documented in the BLONDIHACKS blog post from Feb. 2012, where the awesome Quinn Dunki details the process of design to fabrication in awesome detail. and here and Steve Hobley has run similiar experiments as detailed in blog posts from 2011. kind of cool is that he has a chemist in his family who comments on the chemical processes at work here and makes it a totally interesting read.

the remarkable point is that common vinegar runs about 5% acid by volume where a considerably stronger corrosive is usually employed.

i had to do this! tonight i returned to campus with 3% peroxide, household vinegar, and some salt. i can report that it works very well. slower than the fresh FeCl etchants, but very similar to time need when using the Edinburgh bath we have in the printmaking department. in about 30 minutes, i had etched a one ounce copper plate. as Quinn puts it "not having to deal with storage, use, and disposal of a strong acid is worth it."

i have a close associate in photography and thus access to some pretty aggressive Acetic (it is used as a stop) that we can mix down to a reasonable but higher percentage by volume. i can also get vinegar in up to 30% by volume. this is used as weed killer, but it also looks like it is a lightly regulated as a chemistry. i am also thinking of running some tests citric acid which i could pickup at the local brewing supply house. all of which could make the requirements for Health and Safety easier!

i will be running another board tomorrow morning in the resultant etchant, it should go quicker if the reports are correct. and post images... stay tuned!

Mineways woot!

as part of the V2V project (Valley to Valley), I have started using Mineways to extract data from Minecraft. my charge is to direct an installation build in CA and Russia for the September. Colleagues will be modeling the Silicon Valley(CA) and the Titanium Valley(RU) for the project in an effort to seek out the heart of these places. Mineways is a stellar app that I have been using to extract STL's of the project server (code named) Orwell. to date i have printed about 8 models and Mr. Bickford in SJ has printed a few too.

today i needed to distract myself from some idiocy on campus, so i printed a maquette of the momnument I am building for the V2V project. this is a dual print pieced together. i am not happy with the monument yet but holding it helps me make some choices in my redesign.

pbs gets hip

i am seriously impressed by the campaign that pbs seems to be on top of for the arts/culture programming. in the past 12 months, they have been producing witty, inspired, short format. you might have already been introduced to PBS PBS off book and the relatively new PBS IDEA Channel that have been burning up the YouTubez, both of which seem to be very interwebs/technology/theory oriented... go figure!

here are two episodes if you haven't been introduced:

it is not confined to the interwebs,the other night i caught a 3minute short on the local PBS OTA broadcast featuring a comedian riffing on  contemporary life. unfortunately, i didn't log his name and i need to get back to my real work so mebbe i can do a follow up.

what i like about this type of programming is the fresh way that some seriously interesting theory is being introduced, what they lack in depth they make up for perhaps waking up my 20-somethings that some seriously deep shit may be behind the fascination with things such as immersive worlds, consumerism, open source, and pop culture. as i start to develop my theory course for the Spring semester, i think i will need to consider these closely as media for the students.

ok ok. i will get back to work.

The generous Mr. Castro and squeaky circuits

Last week, I recieved a gift from André Castro (www.andrecastro.info) when he generously shared his circuit diagrams and plans for his noise circuits he calls Tactile Noise Machines. I combined his drawings and with my new drafts using Eagle CAD so that I could prepare PCB's and printed guides for my students.

here are my files to share:
tactile_noise_machines/tnm1.brd
tactile_noise_machines/tnm1.sch
tactile_noise_machines/tnm2.brd
tactile_noise_machines/tnm2.sch
tactile_noise_machines/tnm3.brd
tactile_noise_machines/tnm3.sch

Experimenting with these circuits over the past two weeks, they are making circuit bending instruments using found circuits in a 'sound toy' and adding in one of the Tactile Noise Machine plans. Next we start working on HMI. THey are all assigned to look at the act of making an instrument and consider the aesthetic/symbolic and maybe semiotic value of the methods that the instrument will require to 'play'. Taking a cue from the criticisms in Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne, I have asked them to look for these additional interpretations and metaphors that they can create in the instrument's form.

The sounds they are achieving from both explorations are pretty darn fantastic.

a lecture proposal with dramatic Keanu expletives

i will be doing a lecture for the Leisure Learning Society this October on the history of the Internetz and WWW from the perspective of an artist. after i sent it in, i found out that the guy who had encouraged me to lead a community ed. course actually served on the board of the non-profit company that ran the backbone for NSF.

<Keanu>

WHOA!

</Keanu>

and then he told me that he was one on the authors on the incorporation documents for Edunet.

<Keanu>

Dude.

</Keanu>

i have asked Bob if i can interview him and i will definitely have to do more homework! anyway... here's the proposal:

The Byzantine History of the Internet and the World Wide Web

This lecture is a detailed look at histories of the Internet and World Wide Web from the perspective of an artist and research academic. Thomas will examine the confluences of military, social, and technological advances during the 19th and 20th Centuries which led to our contemporary world of highly connected and intertwined information systems. Some (but not all) of the historic figures and institutions to be covered include: Optical Telegraphy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, DARPA, Paul Baran, Stanford Research Institute, Eglin AFB, Tim Berners-Lee, the National Science Foundation, and the W3C.

Birmingham continued

i am very interested in returning to Birmingham to investigate the gallery culture. the seminar was held at Space One Eleven aka SOE, non-profit gallery devoted to the artist and non-traditional gallery experiences. i met Anne Arrasmith and Peter Prinz the founders of SOE, both generous, hospitable, and sharp people whose mission is to run a gallery that allows artists to exhibit non-commercially viable but vitally important work.

everyone was astounded that i had driven 4 hours to attend, but the seminar seemed perfect to keep me energized about my work and the next steps i need to take. the cost of the trip was around $250 for room, food, gas, and attendance fees. which seems affordable for the chance to network in the region. the drive was really easy, and I discovered that Birmingham in addition to being close to Pensacola, it really a nice central hub for the major urban areas of the (non-Florida) Southeast. it is within 3hours of 4 major cities (Memphis, Atlanta, Nashville and Knoxville).

i had the chance to talk to several other faculty about developing visiting lectures both amongst ourselves in the region and to bring in other high profile artists/theorist to out campuses through sharing of costs. most of the faculty in attendance were from Alabama with a few from GA and TN.

the trip yielded a new colleague, Sarah Marshall who is at University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Sarah also brought a fantastic undergrad by the name of Patricia who is doing some high level aesthetics-data moshing around the culture of cancer. i was energized when Sarah shared her experience about marketing when the Apatow film that shares her name came out. i let her know that the ideas of identity is an important topic in my work, and we were fast friends.

a seminar in Birmingham

i have mentioned earlier in this blog that i have been traveling the SE area to discover the things that would keep me energized and help me expand my network in the region.

this weekend i was in Birmingham AL, the largest city in Alabama (nearly 750k residents and 2.3million in the metro area), to attend a faculty and professional development seminar sponsored in large part by CAA at Space One Eleven.

i have recently decided that i need more representation even though i know that i will still want to make art that is hard to sell to collectors. i am eager to follow the Christo/Jean Claude methodology of selling ephemera/artifacts associated with my projects and thus works like my drawings (Study for My Past Life as Yuri) will fulfill the commercial side. they form a bridge into the more esoteric and less material regions of my projects. i see the opportunity for the drawings and similar work to become a type of advertisement to get exposure to encourage the further exhibition of the hard to market portions of my work into the museum/university/and experimental gallery system.

the first workshop was about resume/CV development and whilst i found that most of it was a refresher there were points where the speaker confirmed that he would have made a similar decision in how to list or organize the document. this session was led by Larry Jens Anderson and he is awesome despite the fact that he felt the language in my statement was too 'flowery'. it reminds me a moment when Shannon Wright told me that my application to a school was fine, but maybe i should tone it down a bit because no one was going to believe i talk in that fashion. then she said even though you do... sigh, it is the nature of this beast.

Larry is sharp and tells you immediately what he thinks; i was in awe by how he listened to people read their artist statements and could give an instantaneous critique! you go Larry! additionally, the work he does is fantastic. he dropped lots of amazing tips on all manner of things including how to get a brief sit down with the director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center to consult on your work. this was definitely worth the $20 cost of admission!

mud + electricity = ??

on Friday, my colleague Adam Shiverdecker and i started a workshop collaboration between students enrolled in the Architectural Ceramics class and the Digital Multimedia (read PhysComp.) class. the idea sprung from Adam's observation that i desired my students to think more about design, fabrication, and presentation and Adam's desire to see his students add kinetics and interaction to the methodologies he was teaching.

at 10:00, we jetted from the faculty meeting to start. Adam set up the teams; he had all members trade contact info with all their teammates I was of course assisted by my two trusty henchmen (ok... lab assistants) Dan McSwain and Juan Rodriguez. additionally Carleton Haack from the ceramics department jumped in form his side and they deftly assisted me in getting kits out to each student group and setting up electrical for the soldering.

the students were furnished with schematics, drawings, and keys to all the components of the Quickly bot^{1 2}. my PhysComp. students took the lead teaching their team members about soldering technique, circuitry, and components whilst Dan, Juan and i patrolled looking for questions and assisting in small ways. the group hummed with small conversations about the methods of using simple techniques to learn basic electronics.

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.

as the first hour and a half drew to a close, one or two teams (of 13) had a fully function circuit exhibiting the light following behavior. and after a ten minute break Adam took the reins and held a hour demo of the slip casting methods. it was the bomb! my students helped a bit when he needed and extra hand and they were suitably intrigued about the ideas about making a complex body for the Quickly. and they got a good idea of the process of going from model to mold to casting.

we ended the workshop with the blueprint of how we wanted them to progress. they have 4 weeks until the 2nd workshop:

1. by next Friday they will have a model of the structure they will use in the project.


2. they will make a cast of the design next weekend because the mold needs one week to cure before casting


3. on the 3rd week they will cast and fire slip castings from the mold


4. on the 4th week they will present a working model and we will do robot races :D


5. by finals week everyone of the team will have their own edition of the project

i believe our small experimental equation is going to bear out ceramics + digital = teh awesome, but we shall see.

CS5 reflections

it has been slightly over 3 weeks since i downloaded the CS5 suite for my laptop and I am not too impressed with the performance on my relatively new Mac (less than 6 months old). i am running:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B05

the new suite really bogs my computer down even when doing simple things like making animated gifs. i also have had problems with the availability of tools common filters and tools (lighting effects for heaven's sake!) in the Ps 64bit version so i have had to down grade the performance to access them. and in my opinion Dw CS5 makes basic site setup less user friendly. it confused my mid-level students who had become quite comfortable with the Basic Tab; not a great idea Adopey!

i am going to suggest to my students that yes the content aware clean up tools are really sexy, but for day to day use I find that CS4 is a fine tool. it pretty obvious that we will need a few more hardware revisions to make this work smoothly, so my recommendation for the student is to go get a deal on CS4 for the mean time. or buy a really tricked out desktop.

almost the whole of august

well this has been quite a ride, the promise to post everyday for the month of August. i almost made it except that the first week of classes ground me down and i was simply exhausted on last Friday and Saturday.

Rubaiyat: "wanna try another month? do you have it in ya? i find this very inefficient method of communication by sending you a message via my blog extremely fun(ny)."

software and the bureaucracy

so the first week of classes has once again an amazing learning opportunity. i created some tension with the CAS technology support group by requesting a free software for the lab machines on the first day of classes. the support group is stretched thin and they thought they had finished for us. things worked out after i explained that it was an emergency, that i had 2 weeks until i absolutely needed it.

since that first day dust up, i have discovered that they did not include what my colleagues and i think are basics such as: Firefox and Filezilla. last semester we had requested and they had eventually given us an Admin account for urgent issues and this isn't there either :/
i don't mind installing Firefox, etc. it isn't a big deal.

the lesson is that we need to be very exacting about what we need each and every semester. i am pulling together a master spreadsheet to send to them with the message that we want to be good team mates, but we are still learning the best ways to work, sorry.

first solder

tonight everyone of my 18 electronics novices successfully assembled a Blinkenlights kit! i am truly excited by the possibilities. i wrote a diatribe on the nature of public art, culture jamming, and intervention. i am tempted to publish the rant here.

this could be very interesting

last night i started my re-striped phys. comp. class. this year we are not going to take it slowly, we move into micro-controllers right away. i borrowed heavily from the syllabi of a good friend Steve Durie from CADRE to make up the schedule and syllabus, in addition there is a cross class collaboration planned to have students of Arch. Ceramics and Digital develop final projects together.

i applied some lessons i learned last semester:

• don't go too slow, my last students handled the technical practice fine


• you need your own tools, ya wouldn't expect to borrow a 00 watercolor brush in the other studios


• have fun, cause mayhem

i gave IMNSHO was a stirring speech about the wealth of resources, the generous community around Arduino, and how cool it is to fail bombastically and gloriously. and i showed the trailer for the Arduino Documentary. i guess i will see what the enrollment is on Wed. if we do maintain most of the 20 students it will be one hell of a semester.

fantastic idea

SAIC, one of my favorite institutions, has a 1.5 credit hour foundations program for all first year students called SAICWired. it teaches the basics of the Mac desktop, simple image composition and color correction through Ps, blogging skills, and simple web development mostly targeted towards gallery building. in other words, digital fundamentals for every student in the program, basic skills for participating in the contemporary digital society.

i try to compress this info into 2week period at the beginning of my classes and thus i lose 15% of my teaching time to basics. many students still need to pick up these basic skills, and it doesn't matter if they are going to be a painter or prosecutor, these are fundamental contemporary skills. the SAIC class is 90 minutes once a week for one semester. what a deal!

i will be borrowing from this! and i will be trying to get it written into our program!

the syllabi are coming together

and dates are aligning, just got off the phone with my collaborator Adam Shriverdecker, the workshop dates that i projected are good and we are green lighted. this is an unholy union betwixt Digital Media and Architectural Creamics, muhahahahahaa. i am really looking forward to this experiment. we have scheduled peer workshops where the students of each class will teach their focus to the students of the others to create a mini project. after the hybrid student teams will design and build a cross disciplinary project for the Final. i wish i was taking this class :D

a reunion?

every CAA is an awesome event; i get the chance to reunite with my former colleagues and discuss our progress, opportunities, and challenges. it seems that every year there is a discussion that we should organize some kind of reunion. tonight i was on a web chat with one of the principals at Alpha One Labs, a Brooklyn Hackerspace; i have been looking to visit A1 Labs and plan to try to schedule time to visit the space during my trip to CAA in NYC this February.

as we chatted and bounced ideas, i mentioned what i do and that i would be in town with some colleagues. he then hit me with an offer: "if we want to have an event at A1, we just need to ask." bingo! wouldn't A1 be a cool place for a CADRE/SJSU reunion/party? imagine a bot building-beer bash with Brooklyn geeks and hackers. just the thought makes me smile.

my recovery from the sleep i missed has been slow so this will be a short post. the semester begins on Monday the 23rd this year! i am in the process of reworking the websites for my classes with a heavy focus on simplifying the material. i looked close at what could be combined today with small reworkings of the design. here's my progress so far.

a funny thing happened on the way to the inter-library loan

a colleague shared a title that he uses for his classes the other day, whoich i wanted to look at it before i commit to the $75 book. a quick jump to worldcat(oh! i love thee!) revealed that the State University System aka Union, had half a dozen hits at other campuses including two major schools only a few hours from the p'cola. i also noted that USF which is close to my mom's house had a copy. since i am on the road for a few more days i assumed, "cool i can look at the USF copy while they ship one of the closer copies to my campus". can you hear the fail horn coming?

yep they shipped the USF copy, or i assume so because it is due now in early November, obviously a faculty checkout. only 2.5 weeks until fall semester! eeeek!

electronics meet ceramics

i met with Adam Shiverdecker today. Adam has proposed that we combine certain elements of his sculptural ceramics course and my phys. comp. course. i am truly excited that this seems like a great opportunity to teach my students about physical construction and Adam is interested in expanding his students' awareness of using kinetics, communication, and HMI in their projects.

we talked about putting together teams of students from both sides to design and fabricate a culminating project for each team. we discussed many different sources: Tim Hawkinson, Natural Born Cyborgs, Hertzian Tales, and Art & Today

this will be a really interesting experiment.

advice for the undergrad on the C grade

one day last week, i had a rather interesting chat whilst on a popular medieval fantasy MMORPG (bet you can figure out which one). as i got pwnd just outside the Westpark Workshop the conversation turned to how to decide whether or not to go to grad school. in itself an excellent question and posed in quite an interesting social venue.

that being said, the one thing that has stayed with me is a curious intricacy of my friend's timetable. my friend has to take a dreaded freshman course during senior year. it is one those 'prep' courses where i believe you only get 1 credit and you have to listen to different speakers every week and do a fair amount of composition. the issue is that m friend put it off, but the class is a requirement. no exceptions.

"When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave."

or recieve a BFA as it is.

i am curious as to what the reaction from my teaching colleagues will be to the advice i freely offered. i told my friend to be blunt and honest with the professor.

i am a senior, i am here to fulfill the requirement, and i want XX for the grade.

i find it liberating to have a student say "I want to get a C, that is my objective." i know right from that moment the amount of time to expect that this person will put forward and i know the amount of time i should spend on counseling the student. the goals are clear.

one thing that i learned from the past year is that while teaching undergrads at the state level, i will be extraordinarily lucky if 15% of my students want to pursue 'my type' of career in the fine arts. i will still require myself to teach at a high level, the work will still be geared to the para-professional who truly wants this as their career. the damned fact is: that it is hard to be in this profession. so if a student sets the goal with me and they want to try to hit 85% of the material with some aptitude, well hell yeah let's hit it. a C shows aptitude, not mastery and it is a fine grade. however, if you want a professional mark then step to it.

hmmm, what do you other college teacher types think?