Posts Tagged ‘motors’

Drawing Machine Madness [polargraph vitamin kit]

Monday, December 31st, 2012

This past week I decided to get into the holiday season and buy myself a Polargraph Drawing Machine Vitamin Kit. The 4- to 6-week wait for delivery is making me feel like a kid waiting for Christmas, though my Christmas has been reschedule to mid- to late- january.

After the idea of a drawing machine came up in one of my projects at the LAB two months ago, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for any information about how to create a drawing machine. Somehow, I came across the Polargraph project in my research but I did not find the project’s code repo or store.

That all changed earlier this week when I came across the BRBO Drawing Robot listing on Tindie. This project was created by Sandy Noble, who leads the Polargraph project. After visiting the Polargraph blog I ended up their Polargraph store. And there in front of me was the Polargraph SD Vitamin Kit; it was love at first sight.

After a few hours of hesitation I decided to pull the trigger. Then by the next morning I had convinced James to order a Polargraph Vitamin Kit for the LAB. I’ll admin it was an easy sell since both James and Josh are as excited as I am about playing around with drawing machines.

The Polargraph project is by far the best documented and supported drawing machine project that I have been able to find. I want to thank Sandy Noble for keeping this project alive and moving forward.

I am excited about joining the community of Polargraph owners and I hope that I, and my colleagues at the LAB, will be able to contribute to this project over the coming years.

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Make Your World – Maker Faire 2012

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Earlier today I returned home from a crazy week in San Mateo, where I was working on putting together the Make Your World tent at the Bay Area Maker Faire. This project was created as a collaboration between the LAB at Rockwell Group and the Intel Experience Research Lab (IXR). By all accounts our booth was a great success.

The Make Your World booth was designed to allow kids to create prototypes of interactive spaces at very basic level.  The booth consisted of 4 spaces, a house, a forest, a city and a spaceship. Each space contained a collection of “outputs” such as lights, bubble blowers, bells, sounds, sirens and more. Booth visitors were invited to create their own “inputs” that could be connected across the 4 corners of the space to control “outputs”.  These staged spaces with reconfigurable “inputs” and “outputs” were designed to inspire kids to imagine new ways to customize and interact with their environments, and to engage them in learning about technology as means to create this transformation.

Between Thursday and Sunday we had the opportunity to teach thousands of kids (of all ages) one of the most basic concepts of electronics – the switch. There were two main activities at our booth. Below I’ve included a slide show with the pictures from Sunday.

The technology infrastructure for this booth was comprised primarily of 4 mac minis running Processing sketches that controlled a bunch of Arduinos. The Arduinos were used to capture inputs and manage the physical outputs (e.g. motors, lights, etc). It was a great opportunity for me to be able to lead the prototyping effort for this project. It was the first time that I’ve used so many Arduinos in a single installation – there were over 20 of them. Definitely learned some good lessons for my future projects designing interactive spaces.

This project, which was in development for about two months, was one of the reasons why I have not had time to create new posts for my journal. So in the coming weeks I look forward to be able to revive my journal once again.

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