Collaborate Disseminate
I got a relatively inexpensive 6040 CNC machine, and have been spending most weekends making the thing work, and then cutting stuff, learning the toolchain, and making subsequent improvements. Probably …read more Continue reading Balanced Design and How to Know When to Quit Optimizing
When [tnjyoung] was asked to build a huge lighted clock for a high school theater’s production of Cinderella with only two weeks before opening night, he probably wished for a fairy godmother of his own to show up and do it for him. But he and his team pulled it …read more
A Markov chain is a mathematical concept of a sequence of events, in which each future event depends only on the state of the previous events. Like most mathematical concepts, it has wide-ranging applications from gambling to the stock market, but in this case, [Jonghong Park] has applied it to art.
The installation, known simply as ‘bit’, consists of four machines. Each machine has two microswitches, which are moved around two wooden discs by a stepper motor. The microswitches read bumps on the surface of the disc as either a 0 or 1, and the two bits from the microswitches …read more
Continue reading ‘Bit’ Installation Combines Art, Markov Chains
[RoboAvatar]’s Chess Robot consists of a gantry-mounted arm that picks up chess pieces and places them in their new location, as directed by the software. The game begins when the human, playing white, makes a move. When a play has been made, the human player presses a button to let the robot to take its turn. You can see it in action in the videos we’ve posted below the break.
Running the robot is an Arduino UNO with a MUX shield as well as a pair of MCP23017 I/O expander chips — a total of 93 pins available! Thanks to …read more
[Josh] wrote in to tell us about an experimental instrument he’s been working on for a couple of months. We’re glad he did, because it’s a really cool project. It’s an organ that uses the principle of back-drive—applying torque to the output shaft of a motor—to create sounds. [Josh] is back-driving four octaves worth of stepper motors with spinning wooden disks, and this generates alternating current. At the right speeds, the resulting sinusoidal waveform falls within the range of human hearing and can be amplified for maximum musical enjoyment.
[Josh] built this organ from the ground up, including the keys …read more
