learning the ropes

This is another color drawing machine — “interactive” this time. You can draw your own quadrilaterals now and turn background blurring on and off (use the ‘B’ key).

This is one of my first attempts at a color drawing machine. I was trying to play with little polygons of color that gradually change color and produce a mechanized motion.

I’ve also been working on mounting systems this week. After the testing I did with Martha Mason and Wendy Richmond last weekend, I’ve been trying to improve the mounting system and and the pulley supports so that the rope stays on the pulley. Martha pointed out that a dancer needs vertical space to work in as well as horizontal space. By opening the pulleys into a triangular formation, I was able to give her the vertical space she longed for.

I bought some pulleys from the hardware store and tried mounting them to the Super Clamps. Mounting them was easy, but as I discovered today, the pulleys are not right for my system. They introduce far too much friction and acoustic noise. They really take something away from the quality that the system had before.

I also experimented with ways of mounting the pulleys that allow me to adjust them easily. While I liked the way the pulleys look when they’re mounted with the pipe running through them, this will be difficult to construct. For now, I think I’m going to stick with the super clamps.

I want to be able to work with two pulleys simultaneously, so I’m adding the rotary encoder to wooden pulley I started building last week. The PS/2 mice have turned out to be quite a clever hack because each one gives me two rotary encoders and three switch inputs in exchange to two pins on the Arduino. I’ve started thinking a bit more about multiples — and while this may be a little premature, I want to work out a bit of the technical end of this before getting too heavily into final fabrication.

I’ve invested rather heavily in this for the past two days. Perhaps because this is more comfortable for me than other things that need to get done now — like preparing for the mid-term presentation.

What this does mean, however, is that I have the pieces for a much more modular system. I’m envisioning a hub that I can plug each pulley into using a single CAT-5 cable. This makes the performance setup clean — and won’t require any soldering.

Today I worked on fabricating another two pulleys out of wood. I finished drilling well-aligned shaft holes in the side pieces and made new pulleys out of particleboard and plywood. The most time-consuming part of this process was cutting the circles out of with the bandsaw. I remembered that there is a jig for cutting circles, but didn’t want to spend time figuring out how to construct it in order to cut six circles. I first started by cutting around the contour of the circle, but ended up just making tangent cuts and then sanding away the excess. I was really trying to have another pulley finished by Saturday so I could test two of them with Wendy and Martha, but that doesn’t seem to be realistic at this point. I still have to make the encoder structure.

The completed wooden pulleys:

I constructed another P2/2 Connector Breakout Board so I can attach another pulley to my performance system. This time, I’ve annotated the photos in Flickr so the next time I construct one of these I don’t have to think how to build it again.

It felt very good to spend much of the day in the shop working with my hands. Much of the week, however, was spent struggling with how to make progress on the materials/form of the rope&pulley and also struggling with what I am producing.

Earlier in the week, I was researching materials. There are two directions I am considering: natural wood (mahogany, maple, walnut, cherry, etc) or recycled parts. The natural wood direction comes from my appreciation for naturally finished wooden instruments: electric and acoustic guitars, pianos, etc. The recycled direction relates more closely with one of the themes of the project which is, in a way, the recycling of musical content and the loop-based music metaphor.

When I got stuck researching, I tried to work a bit with the form. I started with raw sketches and then tried to work material in Google Sketchup.

I spent too much time trying to manipulate the materials in Sketchup, though, and became frustrated. A breakthrough occurred when I realized that I could use foam to quickly work through ideas. My previous prototype was cardboard, which is durable, but not easy to work with quickly.

Pretty in Pink: A photo essay about my process today. Click on the individual pictures for notes.

I made three new prototype shapes today and I’m looking for feedback on them.

I’m crafting another rope&pulley system — this time out of wood to address some of the problems I’ve observed with the cardboard prototype — and also to explore materials.

1-inch x 3-inch pine stock cut into rough forms to make a new set of pulley supports. I’m going to resize the paper templates I used when I created the cardboard prototype so I can accurately drill and shape these pieces.

Wendy came to ITP today to try out the rope&pulley system. We also shot some videos which better explain the interaction between the user and the system.

Introduction

Here, the rope&pulley is controlling the playback speed, direction, and volume of a sample from Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House.”

Explanation

Vertical

Sketches of people standing up and holding onto poles in the subway

Sketches of Exercise in Coles Athletic Center