First stop engineering department. Stuff bought: 2 servo motors, an ATMega microcontroller, 10m of mains cable, 3m of 3-phase AC cable, heat sinks, capacitors. Price: Free! The green skip outside the department is becoming a lot like the Sparkfun store - but free! Everything we need for our wind turbine…

The servos and the heat sinks are from a ROBOT. A robot in a skip? I didn’t realise until I was halfway through scavenging its parts from its innards. I felt bad, its a cute little thing – like a Roomba but chubbier. Oh well, it is now ready for a glorious new life in service of our wind turbine! I also like how when I mention that I have found a robot in a skip to my friends, the first image that is conjured in their minds (and my own) is that of a humanoid robot, damaged, out-moded, forlorn and forgotten. “bzzzzt – but i thought you loved me … krrrrr” <eyes go dim>. Aww.

Steve bringing it together

Working on this wind turbine project, Steve and myself have had a driving philosophy: let’s scavenge it, borrow it, beg for it, find it, save it from the scrap heap and landfill. We hope our wind turbine is going to utilise as much scrap otherwise destined for landfill as possible. Consider it part environmental, part student-budget. Our student loans will stretch only so far.

The latest development: we have a mast to mount our wind turbine on! Beautiful stainless steel tubing, from his parents’ dairy farm. Will go nicely with our genuine Ex-Cambridge University Engineering Department ceiling fan alternator, our hi-fi heat-sink, free-sampled rectifier diodes, and so on.

No skip in Cambridge is safe from us …

Yes, I took design methods, designing with composites, and biomimetics … cool subjects, they were a lot of fun. But right now, with 14 days until my first exam (my masochistic desktop countdown timer tells me), I’m struck by just how bizarre it is to be revising partial differential equations and variational methods (hairy vector calculus on steroids) when in 6 months I’ll be doing design at the Royal College of Art.

Art and maths … definitely more maths in life at the moment.

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I gotta say art from maths is extremely cool, however. Check out the links below for interactive code-generated artwork created via Processing:

• peter blaskovic | escape motions
• Complexification | Gallery of Computation

In a nutshell, we’re making a 1.5m diameter wind turbine, that will power arrays of LEDs on the turbine blades, controlled by an on-board microcontroller to flash the LEDs in time, to trace messages and pictures in the night sky. The entire rig will be wirelessly controlled via a remote keyboard: participants at the festival can take the keyboard and type a message to be displayed in the sky. Cool huh? I’ve nearly bankrupted myself buying components for this project (forgetting we’ll get our art-grant after the festival), so I thought I’d make some progress tonight on the remote keyboard.

Tonight’s mission: Get a keyboard talking via PS/2 to the Arduino (library), to display characters as-you-type on a small LCD screen (library). When you hit enter, the message will be beamed via a wireless link (work in progress) to the wind turbine. Or in tonight’s mockup, sent via serial to a terminal on my laptop. After much fiddling … success!

Type a message …

… submit a message …

… receive a message!

One item crossed out from a very long to-do list:

• Get wireless (radio) link working, play with Xbee modules
• Get persistence of vision working using shift registers for more outputs (build prototype for my bike wheel, a la SpokePOV)
• Play with temperature sensing information for the wind turbine to display

For those that are interested, a list of resources we are using to complete this project is compiled here.

The adjustable circle hole cutting drill bit. I feared for my life whilst in use. It did the job well.

Whilst risking my thumbs during use, I reflected upon how just goddamn cool this tool looks. And scary, if someone else were to come at you with one. Which reminds me, I need to see the dentist soon.

” Congratulations! A letter has been sent to you today which offers you a place to study at The Royal College of Art in 2010/11, on the MA in Innovation Design Engineering.”

OK, now to survive exams and project-work to finish this current degree, and then onto London!

I’ve also ended up with Cambridge’s Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk (GIMBEJ) – a box of random electronics, that travels from hacker to hacker. Components are taken, components are added, before the box is gifted to the next recipient. There’s some tasty DC motors and cathode tubes in there …

Pictures of POV-wand:

SuperHappyDevClub, now in Persistence-o-Vision!

I’m going to kick off the posting with a quick update on two projects I have just started.

The first I cannot elaborate upon too much at this stage, being as it is shrouded in mystery at present. It will involve graphic design, concept sketches and story-boarding for a steam punk interactive film project by Yomz. This project is set to be extremely long-term. The first task is to design a coat of arms for a Victorian-era organisation, named ‘The Clockwork Watch’.

The second project that has just kicked off is less mysterious, but no less exciting. Myself and SJO, another engineer in the department, will be designing and building a series of vertical-axis wind turbines to take to the Nowhere festival in Spain, in July. There are a few ‘stage gates’ that we want to achieve:

1. Build a colourful, spinning wind turbine, a kinetic sculpture to display at the festival.

2. Generate power from the wind turbine. Potential to charge leisure batteries at the festival / invert the power to AC.

3. Attach an LED array to each turbine blade. As the turbine spins, the LEDs will trace patterns and text in the sky!

If you’ve seen my other projects, you’ll suspect I’d be most excited about stage 3. You’d be right! But constructing turbine blades also is really exciting. We are currently looking into building a lightweight frame for each blade, and stretching fabric over the top to create the required aerodynamic shape. Think Wright Brothers, but in a wind turbine.

I’ll be posting updates as they come.

Click the images below to browse the creations.

Steampunk is the intersection of technology and romance. It’s a genre of fiction an aesthetic a musical style and a burgeoning sub culture which delights in making things that are a blend of the modern and anachronistic. – The Steampunk Workshop

… and will typically involve the upcycling of various trash and detritus of yesterday’s (yester-year’s, yester-decade’s, yester-century’s) technological advances.

Brainwave machine control remote (Photo: Myself, using Jelena's shiny SLR)

Synopsis: A pair of goggles, with LED bulbs mounted on the inside of the lenses, pointing at your closed eyelids. The LEDs are controlled by a micro-controller to flash in a sequence of specifically defined frequencies, to take the user from full-consciousness, down into deep sleep and back to consciousness again in  15 minutes. When used in a quiet, calm environment, the effect is a powerfully refreshing nap!

Start/stop

Another Arduino project, this time created as a piece of art to take to Nowhere, a festival modelled after Burning Man, in the middle of the northern Spanish mountain ranges, famed for being the shooting location for the old spaghetti western films. You can still see the dust on the electronics here, its impossible to clean off!

This piece of art was popular during the heat of the day (which was considerable): “Lie down, put these goggles on. No history of epilepsy? ADHD? Good. Feel this big red button here? Press that when you are ready. Turn this dial here, to adjust the brightness. Comfy? See you in 15 minutes!”

The operating principle behind these goggles can be found here. In summary:

Humans have been using light and sound to achieve altered states of consciousness for thousands of years. Primitive cultures used flickering fires and rythmic drumming to induce these altered states. Today, you can choose from a wide variety of electronic brain-wave machines which use light and/or sound to alter brain-wave activity.

Brain-wave activity ranges from fully awake to deep dreamless sleep. This activity is categorized into five primary groups: Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. By using light and sound to induce these brain states we are able to gain greater control and efficiency of brain usage. Furthermore, improvements in relaxation, memory, creativity, stress management, sleep disorders, and even ESP(!) can be had by utilizing a brain-wave machine.

This (now dusty) enclosure is an old 1980's signal conditioner, found in a skip outside the physics department. Couldn't let that go to waste … (the co-ax cables came in handy to connect the goggles!)

I had to build one. Using it has certainly been an interesting experience. I’ve found that power-napping during the day for 15 minutes using this program has left me feeling awake and refreshed afterwards. Could it be a placebo? I don’t know. Taking the device around parties and festivals has certainly been a very different experience: party-goers and revellers have all had differing experiences, as the goggles interact different with their states of mind at the time.

The goggles were made from old welding goggles, and the enclosure from an old signal conditioner from the Physics Department skip. It is very satisfying to have your electronics project housed in a solid cast-steel box like that one, with very satisfying buttons and switches. It’s almost as therapeutic just to pull the levers, and press all the big red buttons.

(Note: The first question asked of anyone wanting to use the goggles was “Have you had any history of epilepsy?”. They are also used at the user’s own risk, and should not be used at all by anyone with a history of epilepsy (obviously) or, (interestingly), ADHD.)

The brainwave goggles, under test, with watchful Dr. Aran looking on (Photo: Davey M)