As part of the Arduino workshop I lead last month I taught the students how to make a modulated square wave instrument. We experimented with various control methods including slider potentiometers and distance sensors. More pictures to follow.
A few weeks ago Tom Vaughan and I started building the first working prototype of our Piston Wall project. Here are some pictures of the three intensive days we spent at Object Studio. Up until this point we had been working on single ‘piston’ prototypes so this was our first experience of producing the components en-masse. We tried to make the design as simple as possible, with the minimum number of components, but it still took much longer than we imagined. There is still some work to do. More pictures and videos will be available soon when we have it fully working.
The ‘Piston Wall’ project is a collaboration between me and the furniture designer Tom Vaughan
The current model consists of 60 pistons each controlled by a stepper motor. The motors are controlled via a controller I designed and today had to assemble. Here are some photos:
Last Wednesday I installed a device that I built for Annika Eriksson’s light installation at the Hayward Gallery. For more information about the project follow this link. Here are some pictures of the work I did and a video of it finally working.
The second part of the engineering workshop I ran at the RCA. After a short lecture looking at stresses, bending moments and applied loads, I asked the students to build cantilever beams. The following photos and videos show the some of the building phase and the final testing to destruction.
Last term I tried something new with the Design Products students at the Royal College of Art. When I was a student in DP I had first-hand experience of the way in which my peers tackled engineering problems. I found that intuitive design decisions were made, along with all important trial and error, resulting in a final solution that was technically sound. I felt that if I could teach some of the key engineering principles relevant to design applications, then the students could undertake engineering design in a more informed way.
What I proposed was a three phase workshop focusing on structures, beams and mechanisms respectively. Unfortunately I did not have time to run the final workshop on mechanisms, but hopefully I will get the chance next academic year.
This post covers the first workshop on structures.
As part of the Future Textiles MA course at Central St. Martins in London, I was asked to give a series of lectures and workshops covering basic electronics and giving an introduction to Arduino. As part of the final workshop session I worked through the stages of building and coding a simple synthesizer that makes sound by sending a square wave to a speaker via a transistor. The results were noisy!
