Circuit Documentations
My partner and I built one drawing machine this recitation. Since the code is given to us along with the circuit diagram, the building process wasn’t hard. For the step of assembling the mechanical arms, the 3D printed component doesn’t fit so well at first. By manually adjusting the size, we succeeded in building the arms and drew one “artwork”. The arms didn’t hold the pen so tightly that sometimes the pen couldn’t draw exactly what we want. But at least we made something artistic.
Answers to the Questions
1.What kind of machines would you be interested in building? Add a reflection about the use of actuators, the digital manipulation of art, and the creative process to your blog post.
I would like to build a pair of earmuffs or something that can reduce the loudness of the environment according to the users’ will. For I want to address the problem of sound pollution, which is one serious concern damaging people’s health. Though we may able to ignore some sound in noisy areas, our ears are still exposed to the voice and damaged because of that.
Thus, I want to use the motors or servos as the actuator to control the earmuffs and voice sensors to detect the loudness in the environment. In this way, the earmuffs can automatically turned to block the extra noice in the environment if the sensor detects such sound.
2.Choose an art installation mentioned in the reading ART + Science NOW, Stephen Wilson (Kinetics chapter). Post your thoughts about it and make a comparison with the work you did during this recitation. How do you think that the artist selected those specific actuators for his project?
This art installation creates sounds with metal rings raising and falling. The whole process of making sounds is just like the working of a system, and by building such system with metal structures and rings, the sound produced can be regarded as the output or expression of such “mechanism”.
Both this Centripetal Sound Machines and the mechanical arms I built this recitation used motors. I used motors to control the pen and draw things while motors are used in another way to make sound in that art installation. Though motors can only move in one particular way, which is to rotate, but with different devices connected to it, there can be various of outputs in very different forms. To use actuators properly, the reacts in different fields can be joint together to present brand new interactions and creations.