For code works, please check it out HERE.

Work on folding fan

Because last week I found a way to make the fan I wanted, this week I worked on the fan-making and the stand of it continuously.

One trouble with the fan stand is that as the sticks rotate, the center of gravity of the fan changes between right and left, which means the support stand needs to have a specific support range rather than a shaft point. I discovered that my ring box was roughly the proper size for support, and I tested the feasibility of the little box as support by manually rotating the fan sticks.

 

(The laptop stand was used as weight.) And I learned to use laser cutting this time, thanks Xiaoran for teaching me how to use the machine! 😊 

                            

In the video, I used a laptop stand and kitchen scissors to hold down the box to prevent it from falling over as the sticks turned. This is clearly not a long-term solution; I need to add weight to the box, so I considered the most basic and best-molded weight, clay.

Well, I’d previously played with baked clay, but it was time-consuming and unnecessary. This time, I tried with air-dried clay.
However, because the box is encased in clay, the clay attached to it is relatively thin, so the clay on all sides is easily cracked. Since when the water evaporates, the density of the clay increases and the mutual support between the clay is insufficient, cracks occur.
It looked obviously ugly, so I painted some patterns to cover the cracks with acrylic paint.

 

     

I’m hoping that the fan can open and close one by one, creating a feeling of flow and structural beauty. So, my current objective is to build four, and the next step is to keep making them in this way.

Cockade fan

Cockade fans actually have a similar fabrication for the fan itself, just add more sticks.

Problem：

The main issue here is that there is no motor that can only rotate 360 degrees forward and then 360 degrees backward. The servo can regulate the precise position but only within 180 degrees, while the dc motor and stepper motor can continue to rotate 360 degrees forward and backward but cannot be configured to rotate only 360 degrees and then stop. 

Solution：

Thanks to my dad! ❤️❤️ I had a chat with him over the holidays about my recent situation. When he heard about my problem, he immediately suggested that I utilize the limit switch. Okay, that’s a new word to me. My father used to be an electrical engineer, but he hasn’t designed anything in more than twenty years. Limit switches, he claims, are a really common component of electrical equipment. 

Thus, I test the code that can achieve control of the motor ( I choose to use a 360-degree continuous servo here since it is smaller and lighter than the dc motor or stepper motor.) And it works. Then I think about the mechanical issue, the design shown below.

                                           

                                    

As you can see, as the servo-mounted stick spins to the desired position, all of the remaining sticks rotate with the force of acceleration. So, exactly like the previous folding fan, I need to fix the first stick facing outside (the first stick of the folding fan is fixed to the front board of the box).

Tip: The clay should be placed on a sponge to ensure that the bottom is breathable, allowing the clay to dry quickly and not stick to the table. I use dish sponges. If anyone wants to play with clay.

                                         

Next to do

1. Work on the fans.
2. Make something as an interactive interface for the gesture sensor.

Current Progress：
This week I tried to use the UV resin to make the fan stick, I am satisfied with the shadowing effect on the wall, which is precisely what I want. Before waiting for the fan mold to arrive, I tried to make an uneven, water-ripple-like condition of the fan sticks without the mold, which worked well. I attempted to connect it to the servo and control the switching with the gesture sensor. As demonstrated in the video below.

 

Problems：
1. Because the contour edge of each fan stick is irregular and has too many angles, it is very easy to be trapped by the fish line between the fan stick when the fan blade spins. As a solution, the fan blade mold is still required.
2. I want the shadow to be colored; I attempted to paint a carp using acrylic paint, but it didn’t work out due to the opaqueness of acrylic paint.

Solutions：
On Sunday, the mold was delivered, and I attempted to produce a few pieces, the results of which are seen below.

1. The regular fan stick should avoid getting trapped in the fishing line and should rotate smoothly. (This is still being tested)
2. The interior hollowing of the fan stick could provide a sensation of flow.
3. Mix the colorant with the UV resin so that a color reflection appears on the wall.

Next…

1. Fabrication for fan and stand.

2. Think about the fan with 360 degrees.

Inspiration: I am fascinated by structural beauty and eastern culture. My family is a traditional Chinese family that instilled in me an early passion for porcelain, pottery, zisha, and other Chinese-crafted artworks, including hand fans. I wanted to demonstrate some eastern aesthetics with machinery after I accessed PCOMP.

The current design: A work on eastern aesthetics that uses servos to portray the structural elegance of the fan. The viewer interacts with the installation through the gesture sensor, and the hand swipes left and right across the sensor to control the hand fan’s opening and shutting, the action is a little like Taichi, a Chinese martial art performance.

User experience Problem: How to guide people to swipe their hands without any text and description. How to achieve the interaction through some icons or signals? 

sketch

Folding Fan  Anatomy of Fan

About the fan： I want the piece to be able to speak across Eastern and Western cultures in both directions. While bringing Eastern aesthetics to Western culture, it also provides the viewer from the East with more possibilities in Eastern aesthetics. The art is intended to break away from a stereotypical image of eastern culture, hence the choice of material for the hand fans is critical.

Throughout Chinese history there have been many Chinese fans, usually classified into folding fans and regimental fans. There was also a fan, where separate sticks were fastened together at one end like the folding fan, but they did not use fabric or leather.

There are two types of traditional Chinese folding fans, the fire painting fan and the Sandalwood fan, which display scenes of landscapes or stories on the fan sticks through painting or carving techniques.

Fire Painting Fan Sandalwood Fan 

Most traditional Chinese artworks are figurative, but I am personally fascinated by abstract expression. So I wanted to make the hand fans show a certain scene or just a feeling in a relatively abstract way through materials and colors. However, the hand fans itself is a particularly figurative existence, so I thought of using light to get the shadow of the fan on the wall, so that the visual experience may be more abstract but also more intense. At this time, I thought that I could use transparent material to make the fan so that the shadow effect could achieve flow and permeability similar to that of a lake, water, or pond. It’s like a glass material, but of course, I can’t use glass to make hand fans.

In the transparent material, I can find the easiest thing to use acrylic, but I tried to play the light through the acrylic on the wall, and did not have the effect I wanted, only a silhouette, no sense of transparency. Then I found uv resin, many people use it to make jewelry, I found a picture of a bookmark made with uv resin, the shadow through the sun on the wall is the effect I want. So I’m going to make the hand fans with uv resin.

Moreover…

There was another type of folding fan named the cockade fan, which was made at the end of the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. The cockade fan was an ivory carved figure story fan, and it could be unfolded in all 360 degrees, later spread to the West and became a “cockade fan” in the old collections of European royalty. If the previous plan works well and I have extra time, I can also add the fan that unfolded 360 degrees.

Lab 1

Lab 2

The summary is included in Week 7’s blog.

Interpreting Serial Data

1. Parsing Text in Arduino

When getting a string of numbers separated by commas, using Serial.parseInt()

int x = Serial.parseInt(); int y = Serial.parseInt(); Serial.print(“x = “); Serial.print(x); Serial.print(“, y = “); Serial.println(y);

  Checking for the right number of bytes:

34, 56, 78 carriage return newline (Comma Separated Values (CSV)) 10 bytes in total

   (Serial.available() > 10)

Lab 1:

1. ASCII vs. Binary  Send the data in many formats

2. Send the values for 3 sensors: formatting multiple data

3. Handshaking

4. Advantages of Raw Binary and ASCII

Raw Binary is more efficient, and readable in Arduino; ASCII is more readable for debugging and easy to use when writing in JavaScript.

5. Advantages of Punctuation and Call-and-Response

The punctuation method for sending multiple serial values may seem more straightforward, but in some cases, the receiver would interpret data as punctuation, not as a sensor value. The call-and-response method could prevent the sketch from slowing down in p5js.

Lab 2:

1. Input

 

2. Draw a graph with the sensor value:

 

3. Reading data as a string. 

 

Change code in Arduino from Serial.write() to Serial.println();  

*note: readLine() is the same as readStringUntil(‘\r\n’);

Lab 3:

1 Output: keyPressed & mousePressed

 

2 send a specific numeric value