Turbidity Paintings hardware build begins

image from OpenROV
http://www.openrov.com/products/2-8.html

I began the build of the OpenROV 2.8 kits today with the immense moral and artistic assistance of Colleen today. the kits are the hardware for a new project called Turbidity Paintings by myself and collaborator Sara Gevurtz that investigates the notions of primacy of perception (Merleau-Ponty) as common root of all art and science.

i was awarded a Florida Research Fellowship in November which included a seed fund to purchase the hardware and get the project kicked off.

we proposed that in the act of capturing abstract images underwater we would also be creating a database of images that could be analyzed by water quality researchers. the title, Turbidity Paintings, is a nod to this idea—turbidity is the measure of particles in suspension in a water column. our project will use two OpenROV units to capture these images and other key water quality data such as nutrients, dissolved oxygen, etc. these data will be used to name the abstract images merging the images into a concurrent state of data and aesthetic object. See: http://turbiditypaintings.com/

the project has gotten some interest in art/science communities and hopefully i will be announcing some other exciting news soon. it has also garnered some attention by environmental science and i have a research assistant from Dr. Matt Schwartz at UWF Earth and Environmental Sciences. we began collaborative research initiative and i will be working with Haley, a production/research assistant from that department.

Colleen and i put in a good 4 hours today; here's a timelapse of Build Day 01. We estimated about another 10 hours of build time until we can hit the pool for testing and learning to drive.

privacy bot

Niklas Roy has definitely created one of the best physcomp projects I have seen in some time. Check out Privacy and Net Curtains

BEST robotics

This morning I am at the UWF Field House to help judge the BEST robotics competition, a high school level games to develop a Robotics project. The theme/narrative this year deals with addressing production techniques and problem solving as well as the actual robo-games. The folks seem nice but seem a bit cautious. So it will be very interesting to see if they warm up to me.

the summer's big research question, perhaps answered

as you might already know from a march post, i have been building autonomous little singing robotics. since our relocation, i have (naturally) been re-inspired by the pernicious environment of Florida. so much so that i wish that my artificial life-forms take place in the outdoors. which in turn, brings the question of how do electronics survive in a place where the humidity is so thick that metal will egregiously oxidize from contact with the air itself. i have several tools that I have owned for 15 or more years which never showed any corrosion that have turned completely rusty in the year we have lived here.

the obvious solution is to encase the the structures in a protective box, but i felt hesitant to employ this solution. there are formal sculpture qualities emerging from the component architecture which i find stunning. likewise, immersion of my babies(!) into blocks of resin seemed to cheapen the contours and assemblages of circuitry. and both of these ideas present all manner of problems to mounting of the piezoelectric transducers, the voices of my bots!

after a little web crawling i have discovered a likely solution:CorrosionX, a product used by the marine industry and RC hobbyists for waterproofing their electronics. the bonding technology sounds good, water and corrosion resistance seem to have a long life, promises dielectric properties up to 20Kv, and an invisible coat. the order has been placed and i look forward to my tests of the product. if this works well, i may realize my vision of truly embedding the critters into the environment for somewhat of a feral life.

here comes the sun

i want to introduce two new autonomous circuits i have built and added to my e-beastiary. the circuits are variations based on the solarsoundmodul by Ralf Schreiber. the critters are photovoric singers that employ a Schmitt Hex Inverter IC, resistors, capacitors, piezo buzzers, and a photovoltaic cell. the modulation is slightly different on each output pin from the varied combination of capacitance and resistance. they range from creacking to screaming, lilting to terse. the lovely thing is that they change as the environment changes, of course chief is the angle of the sun to the solar cell, but unexpectedly and pleasing are other variables like movement, wind, fluttering leaves and branches which all effect the output. this produces a direct response to the environment reinforcing the autonomy of the critter.

my next goal is to embed them into the landscape. i have a fortunate opportunity that my current employment site is in the middle of a nature preserve. to be continued...

tweet tweet nope, not twitter

for sometime I have wanted to make some physical computing projects to accompany the electronic noise art jams in which i occasionally participate. i wasn't sure about what to do, but i have grandiose thoughts about performative robotics which execute to sensor data from the musicians. additionally, i am working with a BEAM design originally published by Ralf Schreiber called the solar sound module. the sound module is uses a schmitt trigger inverter to generate waveforms from which the piezoelectric buzzer can squeal and buzz.

i was working on a Schreiber inspired 'squeaker' circuit today when a new call for a jam on the 26th came across my mailbox. currently, i am designing a sound environment/sculpture from these inspirations, but when the call came though I was testing a sound module on my breadboard and it hit me: ??why can't i build and play the critters live/in real time??'. the jams are an improvisational method as is testing all these differing component combination on the Schreiber circuit. i will use a bread board and components as well as contact mics and a mixer to port in my 'music' to the jam.

playing with my work/improvisational physical computing from kid Neutrino on Vimeo.

as usual I come to party late, but what a party it is. i discovered afrotechmods last week and nearly wasted an entire day being awed, fascinated, and learning the electronics and comedy stylings of afroman.

his techniques go from hyper-ridiculous to downright epic tutorials for the electronics geek. afroman you are my new hero!

the unvieling of fontanaBot

6june2008: day 1020 of my graduate career and day 4 of Zer01 Festival 2008.

the public seemed delighted by the knife wielding robot known as fontanaBot. throngs of visitors crowded 1st street tonight and to my eye the numbers are here-to-fore unprecedented for the South Bay First Fridays. the event was ramped up for SubZero, an exposition of projects in honor of Zer01 2008. nearly 50 participants exhibited hacks, hardware, interactivity, and all-around art. here's a teaser video from us:



the hearing loss i am feeling this morning induced by the nieghboring project Drone Machines by Tristan Shone(which btw is an amazing project!) is a small price to pay for the downright success of fontanaBot's first public outing. the machinic artist executed dozens of works over 6 hours and evoked all the responses that one would expect from disbelief to amusement and back to disgust again, a little controversy is always good , no? read more at www.thomasasmuth.com

much to my amusement i learned that the other robotic art exhibition at SubZero was a project by my neighbor in Oakland three units down! the Boise Cascade has become a hotbed of hardware art.

Junkbot Safaris

Dumpster Dives and Junking for Bot parts
I have been going out on Junkbot Safaris looking for pieces and prts for the robots I want to build. I put a simple scrapping tutorial on instructables.com to help the people who want to come to my seminar. The Engineering Dept. does a bang up job of up dating equipment regularly and before the recyclers come, it usually sits for a week or two. As far as I can tell it is a win-win, the dept. has pays less because the waste load is reduced and we get 'monetarily' free materials. And if you dispose of your scrap with a proper recycler it is a responsible act as well.

My policy is to make sure the area is as clean or cleaner than when I arrived.They know that folks like me are on salvage operations. A sure way to get them to lock down this valuable material is to make a big mess of small parts for someone else to clean up. Please be kind to those who allow you access to this material. Here's an image from my tutorial.

insert images

For the next bot seminar I want to get as many folks to part out old devices as possible. We will probably have to do a two part seminar. Part A: Salvage, Part B: Bot Construction.

follow up on bot

the quickly bot works very well in the bright light of daytime. i used a yard stick and my hand to shade the photo-diodes and the bot responded very well. obviously the photosensitive diodes i bought take quite a bright light to trigger the IC. i plan on looking for more sensitive hardware to improve the performance.

i took some video of the behavior but accidentally erased them in moving files around today. as soon as possible i will retake the videos and post them.

here are some stills until i reshoot the vid

bot building

i have been struggling with the schematics and building a bot design called the Quickly by Math Vos. the name Quickly refers to the small number of components and short amount of time that it takes to build it. i was not so quick in building it because i am so new to circuitry. Steve Durie consulted with me today and taught me a little about how to look at the circuit diagram. He encouraged me to look up the specs of the LM386 IC. we were able to make to informed guesses about the IC function. i then coupled this information with the schematic and the circuit board drawing.

this is a reversal of the drawing i made to could conceptualize the circuit more easily:

the bot was exhibiting behavior tonight consistent with the function. the bot is having trouble grabbing a good footing so i experimented with a few different materiaals added to the motor shaft. so far none of them are great. the bot was responding very well to the bright sunshine reflected into the room. i will need to find or construct a super bright light source to keep tuning the bot.