assembling’s a comin

We have finally started to get everything together – cut files, materials, etc. Here are some of the drawings that we have produced lately in working towards finalizing design and assembly. We’ve all had our hands on the rhino file, which would normally prove to make a really unorganized file but I think it has proven successful in getting all of our heads around what we’re trying to make without having physical objects to look at together.

The rest of our construction materials should be in tomorrow so assembly should start this weekend! I think we’re hoping to have at least one of the final modules put together for Friday’s class. There’s been a bit of difficulty in communication lately with the break and whatnot, but I don’t doubt that we can pull everything together, perhaps with a necessary all nighter or two.

this is a happy face :)

So as I was considering posting, I decided to read through the most recent entries made by my class mates… and group members. Considering the frustrated and sometimes really depressing posts (yes, you Pete!), I shall try to stay positive, so bear with me…

This week we’re producing a prototype to start playing with. We have the materials and a laser cutting time, so we’re already half way there! Once we get this more full-scale model built, I think things will start moving faster. As soon as we get a constant light source coming in through our wall, we should be able to play with the code for variability. A lot of us really got excited about the idea of making an ambient light that fluctuates throughout the day (John Marshall suggested the idea of “a cloud passing by” that I think stirred up quite a bit of interest). Hopefully by the end of the week, we’ll have more pictures!

I think we’re all getting along quite well, it’s just a matter of attempting to better meet everybody’s goals, so that we don’t lose our enthusiasm (as it is obvious starting to slip).

Our first prototype

Taylor and I missed the group’s “play time” activities yesterday because we both had other meetings, so today we were given the task of hooking up the servos and getting the code to work. I thought it was going to take all night because I hadn’t looked at Arduino code since the third week of the class. It surprisingly didn’t take long at all, and it was a nice switch in roles.

We decided to just use the manual controller that we used to turn the servos in class for the demonstration tomorrow. I think where the interesting part of our project will come in is in figuring out a more efficient system than hooking up servos to every individual part of the surface, which we’re currently in the process of researching…

 

 

Heliotropic Umbrellas

So, our final project has been constrained to about the scope of our second project, but expecting higher quality results. We’ve agreed on an array of “umbrellas”, using the north campus diag as a site, that collect energy during the day and use that energy to supply electricity to passerby who wish to use their laptops outside when it’s nice or to light up the walkway at night. It’s simple yet understandable and encouraging people to get outside, even if they still need to be tethered to their laptops and cell phones, etc… Street lights already use the most energy efficient lights, so obtaining that energy from the light during the day is even better. So the design isn’t completely “extra”, because night lights are necessary and so the design is fixing an issue that already exists, on top of providing some extra daytime bonuses to the diag, meaning we also have the social additions at an attempt to get the north campus diag to be used as more than passing space.

Here are some simplillustrations. Once we get a more defined design down, I will post some more diagrammatic illustrations.

 

 

What?Why?Difference?

We’ve gathered into our final groups and I think its the general consensus that everybody is mostly satisfied with who they’re working with, and that most of the problems no longer lie within the who but the what and the why. There were two general approaches to the projects this week: the more top down approach of choosing an idea to go with and fitting the constraints of the class into it, and the more bottom up approach of listing all of the constraints/interests and trying to build an idea from there. They are both very good ways of working, but both have their faults. What everybody was lacking in was having a little bit of both approaches to design, which is a lot more difficult to do than to say…

In that regard, my teammates and I started with a top down approach, coming up with a few ideas that could potentially meet the course requirements, each idea having both ups & downs. So we decided to take the weekend to come at the project from the other end, setting aside our ideas and focusing on coming up with specific interests and things we want to get out of this course. After that, if time allows, we’ll try to individually brainstorm some more ideas based on our own interests and then bring everything together and see where overlap occurs…

[So I'm posting mine here for documentation]

I think the thing that I am most generally interested in is the idea of upsetting/questioning/critiquing the everyday life. To specify further, what interests me most in the possibilities between human and cyborg relationships is that disconnect in emotions. Rather than provoke certain emotions from humans with a cute-shelled robot, I’d find it fascinating to try to develop a cyborg that is more “socially robust” and can effect human emotion on a more urban scale, rather than individual. There is a lot of “oomph” packed into “heliotropicsmartsurface” that we are not currently bringing out and questioning to make design projects that can stand on their own two feet (and not just a black box that has a “heliotropicsmartsurface” coating on it). I don’t specifically mean my group but everybody in the class seems to be struggling with the same questions: What makes your project more efficient that just putting a bunch of solar panels on the ground? What is its unique design that gets beyond “heliotropicsmartsurface”? How is this better / more efficient / any different than just plugging it into a wall or using some other form of energy? These are the questions, at least at a minimal, that I think John, Karl, and Max were getting at on Friday.

In regards to what I want to get out of this class, if I may be very specific, I want something for my portfolio that is in an urban environment and that poses an interesting idea that perhaps counters the general idea of “heliotropism”. I of course want to harness the sun’s energy and do so in a project that wouldn’t make sense any other way, but I’m really interested in creating a mini-city/meta-city “world” (surface) that is powered by the sun and exists beneath the earth. I think that would be an amazing opportunity to question the constraints of “heliotropic” and something that I would be proud of having in my portfolio, as I believe that undergraduate education should have no limits and that the undergrad should question everything. In regards to this, I think the subways or perhaps a surface that burrows itself would be extremely interesting and a worthy design project. The heliotropism is completely necessary because the initial investigation is questioning the limits of solar energy.

 

In regards to perhaps coming up with ideas that emulate this, I thought I’d do my quick brainstorming session here, too… I’m going to try to not spend more then 15 minutes on each idea. 

Cyborg City1:  Walking the Beat

Site:   Central Park or the Arb

synopsis:   1984-esque cyborg intrusion- dozens of robots mapping city or park area, working around the clock to first triangulate entire area and then grow a database by constantly taking pictures and collecting all of the data from the different robots into one location. Robots searching for litter? Litter can be traced by location of dropped litter, identifying the litter, tracking all locations close to drop point that sell / are associated with the identification of the litter, checking the store’s inventory and see what time the object in question was purchased, check store’s camera for persons at specific time who bought this item. Facebook this person for identity / possible paths or routes they would take to get home, tag person so local law enforcement can send them a ticket.

technology already in existence:   iPhone app that allows you to search by taking a picture, searches flickr’s database, tracking/mapping capabilities if data can be sent via wi-fi

This idea on the city scale would probably take years to develop such a library to search within and, most obviously, this is super crazy and futuristic and not at all possible to do in five weeks, but it might be interesting to consider what is potentially feasible to accomplish…

project agenda for cyborg city 1:   set up an 8×8 grid for tracking and roaming, configure arduino to hook up with a camera / iphone, build up quick library for facial & litter recognition and write a program that can interface between iphone app & facebook, build “realistic” store inventories to places outside of the 8×8 grid to test with, use team members faces & online profiles for testing, test how much a single robot can do and still save solar energy for nighttime/times when there isn’t sun

What makes the helio necessary? The only way for these things to build up an immense library is to work 24/7, and the only way that they could do this without using craploads of taxpayer’s dollars is to work off of “free energy”, the sun being a perfect avenue for this.

Surface?   With multitudes of these little guys working to cover larger areas and sharing information between each other, they are creating both physical and virtual surfaces!

The design intent (ie why is this better than just sticking a bunch of solar panels on the ground?):   The entire goal is to save energy and crack down on environmental rules, and the Big Brother atmoshphere is interesting to question in terms of ethics and creating new social norms. ie: do new yorkers all become hoarders because of this thing? How can something with no discrimination that acts on data alone invoke this overwhelming emotion of fear that this would most likely create?

 

Cyborg City 2:   Subway Dwellers

site: NY subways

synopsis:   robots swarming into and out of subways, using the sun to give them all access to the city and not be tied down to a cord or other energy source. The subway then becomes a meta-city for them, possibly at night. Implementation not yet sure… perhaps they repair lines? bring plantlife into the subway that couldn’t otherwise exist beneath the ground without constant attention? wash the subway cars? collect the trash or newspapers? looking for that one thing that could bring the “sun” into the dark…

helio/design intent:   to reconsider the parameters of solar harvesting in an interesting way

 

Cyborg City 3:   Invasive Questioning

site: any urban environment

synopsis:    a group of robots that learn to “think” on their own, based on what the current social norms are. they possibly begin by triangulating the city, mapping economics, media trends, ethnicities, other social ecologies… Through constantly updating the information in the decided categories, the robots can then be used to either critique or question or make apparent grotqesue / “unethical” situations that occur in everyday life that are otherwise not conceivable for a human to point out due to having gotten used to certain conditions. The robots could potentially graph information and look for outliers in ways that humans could potentially not see them. For example, if the robots looked at public data about TV watching or obesity trends, they could realize that the current projection has dramatically shifted and then in some way be a nuisance to bring it to realization… ie robot thinks “too many fat people -> eliminate fat people? not allowed. eliminate fast food? all cyborgs go blockade fast food locations nearest you.” Through its mapping and programming, thoughts like this might eventually be able to be reached if the programming is capable to reprogram itself over time to consider new variables.

5 week possibilities:   create five to six small versions of these robots that can triangulate an 8×8 area, in which we put different types of data that simulates real-world information(perhaps just with RFID-tagged information?) that they then graph and search for outliers. We could then create a series of reactions that they could start out with and research ways to update information from a base location.

Helio necessary?   mobility and constant use

design intent: analyzing how we perceive our everyday life, in a way that is not limited by our short term memories and emotionally-attached rationale.

 

…I’ve run out of time for now but I’ll post some concept drawings soon…

last night extravaganza!

So after two weeks of work and worrying about making it to the finish line, we managed to pull it all together and come out with something I think we’re all proud of. Alyssa, Johanna, and I spent hours on the presentation while Eric, Damien, and Neil worked on working out the kinks, then we all came together around 9pm and worked through until 2am to get to a more finished looking prototype. I don’t think any arguments broke out at all in the 8-12 hours we worked together today.

Since it is very late (or early), I think I’ll just put up some images that exemplify our great final efforts in collaboration and leave the words for thought for another day…

diagramming scalability!

some diagrams on scalability and renderings of the “bubbles”…

 

construction/assembly

not what we ended up doing for the final model, but I spent a while on the diagram so I wanted to post it! *ie mis-spelled flex as flux… sorry.

thar she blows!

Thankfully, our efforts to do something unique and creative have paid off. Thanks to Damien’s flickr set, I can share some images! I felt kinda awkard last Friday when we were asked to give an update on our status and we said we hadn’t built anything yet. This was true, but we had been meeting and we carefully thought through everything to make sure that the idea of inflating/deflating with the Arduino was indeed a feasible one. Without doing this, I don’t think we’d have so easily gotten to where we are now.

Thus far, we have working code and we have a working air pump that can also double as a water pump. At tonight’s meeting, we’re all going to work on assembly. Johanna and I are putting together a Digital Project file and Alyssa is working on our presentation, so as of now it seems like everything is going to come together smoothly by Friday, with no need to stay up all Thursday night! I think we may have met all together a total of 4 or 5 times, and then there has been ongoing smaller meetings between people collaborating on elements as well so teamwork & collaboration has definitely been in the “highly committed” range.

Anyway, without going too much into long spouts of detail, here are some lovely images that I will comment more on after we get stuff working tonight. (fingers crossed!)

initial brainstorming:

Johanna attacking that first bubble:

one of our first few creations, filled with water:

(successfully making a non-leaking bubble was so exciting!)

template for bubble system:

testing bubbles with an turkey baster, an air pump, and then converting the air pump to a water pump (great idea a la Eric’s brain):

building & testing the bubble surface:

To make the inflation/deflation more obvious, I think we’re going to have to make bigger bubbles. We’ve thought of many different ways of application that makes our design relevant, especially considering the notion of scalability, which we intend to address fully in our presentation. I think one of the most interesting applications is the idea that we’ve created this system that can behave much like the lotus leaf, which has characteristics of being both hydrophilic and hydrophobic, but we’ve sort of changed their relation to each other by making them occur at the same scale (where the lotus leaf does achieves this at two different scales). I think this potentially “one-ups” the lotus leaf because the surface can then allow for a decision to be made (whether it’s by the machine, a person, time, daylight, etc) as to when the it is -philic and when it is -phobic, which allows for more variation and many more possibility of how to it interacts with its surroundings / contrarwise.

collaboration activated!

After a very frustrating Friday, we had an extremely productive group meeting on Monday. I think we all just needed time to think about the project, and the short period during class in which we were expected to produce something created too stressful of an environment to cooperate let alone think in.

That being said, our last meeting went quite well. I think we were really smart in how we’ve chosen to use this two week time period. Rather than just tackling a very specific design for a very specific end product, we have decided  to focus on a performative idea and use this first week to prototype. We have come up with a more difficult way of doing things and then an easier way to accomplish the same goal. If by Sunday we can’t get the idea we want to work, we still have a week to do the easier idea. That way, we have a backup and can really begin to explore some interesting ideas.

Without giving everything away or getting over-excited before we ahve fully tested things out, we’re basically taking my idea of an inflatable and combining it with Johanna’s interest in creating a moving surfaces as a wall, Alyssa’s intent to focus more on spectacle, Damien and Neil’s awesome ability to figure out the engineering, and Neil’s ideas that dealt with converting solar energy to heat and the use of solenoids and pistons. If we can bring it all together, we’re basically looking to create a sort of responsive “bubble wrap” that responds or behaves in relation to light. I think our intent can sort of be boiled down to “scale-ability”. We wanted to invest research into something that could potentially be worthwhile in the final project, so we’re focusing on figuring out a simple way to connect parts to make a whole and sort of emulate what Max talked about in regards to the lotus plant’s ability to have different behaviors due to its hyper-existing structures.

To sort of expand on and merge Max’s in class examples, I’d like to end this post by sharing a really interesting TED talk that shows the research of metastructures of different organisms and use of the research in advancing techological design. Really cool stuff.