- Build the circuit
The circuit looks complicated at the first glance. It took me a while to build it.
With experience learned before, I finished the circuit in one shot – it worked as soon as I pasted my code and I clicked the upload button.
2. Control rotation with a potentiometer
This is the step that causes much pain on me. I added a potentiometer as the diagram shows and I am pretty sure the potentiometer should control the flow of the entire the circuit. The problem is, the stepper motor just didn’t respond to my potentiometer!
Then I had to turn to Rudi for help, he checked my circuit and everything seemed fine. And that’s when he spotted where the problem was: the potentiometer had a poor contact with the breadboard! All I had to do to fix my circuit was just to push the potentiometer a little harder onto the breadboard. Lol, that was both shocking and funny. It was such a minor problem that almost ruined my work!
And after that, Marcelle came to me and found I was recording it. She reminded me that it would be more visually friendly if I stick a piece of tape onto the stepper motor and then record it. And it turned out she was right, a tape helps make the movement more visible on a video.
3. Build a drawing machine!
Initially I thought the machine could draw something on its own until Luke reminded me that it was our job to use the potentiometer to draw. So we combined our stepper motors with the arms, holders, and couplings. And we started to draw!
Hmmmm it didn’t seem to work very well. It was hard to make the pen perfectly attached to the paper and the stepper motors kept shaking even when we tried to stop it. So our drawing looks ugly and makes no sense… Anyway, we managed to build the machine and made it work!
Question 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 machine that keeps me focused while I read. It can detect your eyeball movement and scan what your content on your laptop in order to determine whether you are looking at your laptop and whether you are using your laptop to read. If it determines that you are not focused on reading, it will yell “FOCUS!” at you and keep you back on track. The machine involves a camera, an eyeball sensor, a servo or stepper motor, a buzzer and many other stuff.
Actuators is something that transform digital signals and electric power into physical movement, or forces. It is kind of output that can impact the physical world. My machine will use a motor to move the camera that captures my eyeball movement. It moves the camera in order to keep track of my eyes.
Digital manipulation of art is a process where you edit, alter, and change art works using a computer. The important presumption of that process is that the art to be manipulated must be transformed into a digital forms. Images, words, videos are arts that can be transformed digitally while physical devices can rarely be manipulated digitally. Digital manipulation can help create something that does not exist in physical world and empower artists with limitless ways of creating stuff out of nothing. It helps artists go beyond physical limits. Digital manipulation seems irrelevant to my machine since my machine has little thing to do with art. But the way of alarming the user can go beyond audio alarm and can take on the form of visual experience that uses digital manipulation. For example, the machine can take a picture of the user when he/she is not focused and manipulate the picture in a funny way to mock at the user.
Question 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?
I like the project “Firebirds” created by Paul DeMarinis. It uses “gas flames modulated by electrical signals” (p. 118) to play the voice of Hitler, Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin. And the flame is trapped in a birdcage. I like this project because it uses a technology I have never heard of – control the flames to vibrate the air in order to make sound. The political speeches of the politicians echoes the birdcage and displays a strong sense of satire.
In comparison, my work in the recitation can be used to create something while project Firebirds displays something on its own. The latter needs human intervention while the latter doesn’t. So project Firebirds is not necessary interactive. I am not really sure what kind of actuators that project uses. It must have some actuator to control the flame and it can be a valve or blower.