Flex Sensor

The instructions for using the flex sensor in the arduino sparkfun kit is set up to run a servo, but I wanted I was thinking that it could possibly be more useful to my group's lighting project if it somehow interacted with light (duh). I found this code online, the diagram to set up the board was really awful though, so this moment was really exciting to me. Next step: play with the sensor controlling brightness. should be easy, right? yeah. YEAH!

Conductive Fabric

conductive fabrics just sound really exciting. Even when I had no idea what you could do with them. I've been researching them for hours on end now, and I found this super cool (helpful) website that made me decide that I just needed to try something simple... and to my surprise, IT WORKED! may the experimentation continue.

Merry Go Round

Solar water heating with a merry go round? I'm not sure if this is even possible, but I made a model today for my idea. All the moving parts would be on a separate piece that could potentially spin some sort of turbine under ground. The water would be pumped through tubing on a stationary piece that fit under and was protected by the moving piece.

Still thinking about some sort of interface indoors to show how much heated water is available. I thought it would be interesting to use light on conductive fabric for a shower curtain as a visual aid to the amount of hot water.

Extra Porous Clay for Soil Replacement

After talking with John Leyland, who runs the ceramic studio, we decided the best way to make an extra porous clay was to put sawdust in the clay before firing. This will leave tiny pockets when the sawdust burns out in the kiln. All ceramic objects are porous after the first firing, so this is just an add-on, making them extra porous.

Week FOUR

NEXT WEEK WE PRESENT IN DETROIT! I'm really excited and nervous and everything else.
My project this week is a Hydroponic garden system. I'm in the clay studio about to make Ex-Clay or expanded clay, which is clay fired at a certain temperature 1,200 °C (2,190 °F) to make it expand like popcorn, but not shrink back. This leaves the clay in a porous state, and it is the soil alternative we have chosen for our system. Most plants respond well to hydroponic growing, but you have to add nutrients to the water, which seems like a low cost venture, and definitely easier to deal with for indoor growing than soil.

Week 3

This week, my group had a lot of differences, I often felt like we were spinning our wheels. But in retrospect we were quite productive.

We designed a water heating system that was self protecting from theft by turning over at night. It was actually a pretty cool design. When turned over in the "night" position, the reflective material that is used to focus light on the water tube to heat it, reflects lights from LED's back into the room.

The idea of using the reflective material at night was my input into the team, although we did not have enough time to really develop the idea in a usable way on our model, I think there is a lot of potential for the way light moves through water. The only problem being, that the tube needs to be black in the day time in order to best heat the water, but the light would pass through the water best and create the most desirable effect if the tube were clear. Maybe we should have considered some sort of material like transition lenses in some glasses. However I'm not sure that would provide the insulation qualities we required.

Branden showed me how to use the laser cutter when we were building our model, even though we had a demo, I was still unclear. I really appreciated that.

Jellies!

So, we switched groups. My words to work with are now Wind, Daily, and Inflation. The previous group that worked with these words made a very cohesive shade/ventilation wall-window.

The assignment for the week was to

1. make better models (they gave us acrylic and we had a laser cutting demo) and

2. make it light up (we also got motors, LEDs and potentiometers).

We decided to revamp the purpose of what the original group came up with, instead of ventilation we brought the unit inside for air filtration. The inspiration for a lot of our decisions/concepts came from jellyfish. Jellies cycle the ocean water through a simple motion, and lets face it, they just look cool. Some deep water Jellies are also bioluminescent, which fits in with our need for light. We kept the bellows and hexagon, from the original group design, and I got to play with fabric. This is my personal process for the fabric portion.

first I had to figure out the appropriate angles so I would have the correct size hexagon after sewing the darts.

After all the darts were sewn, I stitched the fabric to the acrylic using pre-cut holes. I was really glad that I have tiny hands at this point...

so there we have it. I can't wait to see it with LEDs!

one week later

I've met with my group three times since we first met. Each meeting has been more relaxed and comfortable. Although we are very different, we seem to be able to understand how to work together at this point.

We have designed a solar panel/ventilation system (seemingly for a roof) that would have a base made of something with a high "r" value, which I was told means high resistance, an example being wood. That got me a little excited.

Originally I had presented my idea for ventilation to the group as an octagon, but I was overruled that hexagons were better, which is fine. I understand their reasoning, the way it sits in multiples does seem better.

Today we are presenting our model and process that lead us to arrive at our model, to our peers. I hate talking in front of people... I never seem to say exactly what I want to say. But, I will do the best that I can when it is my turn to speak.

Multidisciplinary Collaboration

is really difficult.

I love collaboration with other art students, because we all think the same way. But if you throw some Engineering and Architecture students in the mix, things get hairy. It isn't that we can't get along, and it certainly is not impossible. It's just that we don't understand each other's process for undergoing the same task. We all think our way is the best way, I am certainly guilty here.

The point is not to prove that you are right and they are wrong, or be convinced that they are right, the point is finding the happy medium. I seem to remember getting an email prior to the first day of class saying explicitly to "leave your ego at the door" this is IMPORTANT, I take that to heart, I'm not afraid to admit when I don't know something. But everyone in the room deserves respect, and respect is different than allowing everyone to speak.

This is not a cry of anger, this is not complaining, this is me saying exactly what I see from my perspective. I think things will improve, upon the second meeting with my group I felt everyone had cooled their jets a little, including me.

Maybe this is because our super cool professors were not watching us, you know, "no pressure" right? We were able to reach a consensus that everyone seemed happy with and set tasks for people in the group to work on until we could meet again. After all, when you put this much time into something, with six people with six schedules you have to figure out assignments.

We did not totally scrap our first hodgepodge idea from day one, we decided to push it. Given the three words Annually, Heat, and Sliding we are, as a group, to design a smart surface.

I think we will do just fine and dandy (with a little elbow grease), here we go!