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.

the first of many temporary autonomous zones

maybe the it is the ugliest homebrew circuit of all time but i successfully broadcast a mighty 1/2 watt of the local Chinese language AM radio to 97.10 FM. John Bruneau asked if I would be able to help him build a FM transmitter to broadcast TV signal this summer. The only bummer is that the kit from Free Radio Berkeley (FRB) is about 150 bucks.
I did some digging around after I remembered talking to the mavens of SF micro-radio Neighborhood Public Radio; they had told me about Tetsuo Kogawa. Kogawa pioneered micro-radio and micro-TV work in Japan. And he has published his notes, manifestos (temporary autonomous zones and polymorphous space), and plans on the interweb. The plans allowed me to whip up this transmitter for less than $15

next step to find the right trimpot to tune the sucker to any channel



CADRE TV!

sculpting update

a little set back in that the C patterns are too big. Sarah is taking them all in. bless her! it is beginning to take shape though! yay verily! click the photo to go to my flickr set.

steampunk magazine

http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/index.html


check out the electrolytic etching in issue 1. i have been reading about this for a month now and i am going to suggest this to the nlisters for an afternoon activity, etching party!