Applied Kinetic Arts

Fellow Applied Kinetic Arts member, Reuben Margolin, gave a talk about his work at TED recently.
Please have a look and enjoy.

I have been buying from and recommending ServoCity.com for a very long time for RC servos and small motors. I just found that they have added an even wider range of gearmotors, including micro-gearmotors in a block shape with nice mounting holes on different axes. Their selection of chains, sprockets, gears, wheels, and brackets is fantastic, and I have always appreciated the accessible way they present it all. Oh, and their prices are great too. Click here for the gearmotor page.

“Make: Live airs tonight! Don’t miss our mechanics episode where guests Lenore Edman, Windell Oskay (in the picture), and Dustyn Roberts join us to show off their kinetic projects”

MAD SCIENTIST ARTIST GARAGE SALE
@ XIAN STUDIOS
February 5th & 6th
11am – 6pm

XIAN STUDIOS
1037 Murray St.
Berkeley, CA 94710

(one block south of Ashby, off San Pablo Ave. Up the street from Urban Ore)
MAP: http://goo.gl/maps/PPFN

We’ve got an incredible collection of gear here at our art space and it’s time to get rid of it! Incredible prices! Priced to move! Deals Deals Deals!

Art – Art Supplies – Electronics
Circuit Boards – Stereo Equipment
Speakers – Computers – Printers
Hard Drives – Monitors – Servers
Electric Motors – Photography
Camera and Video Gear – Tripods
Clothing – Fabric – Jewelry – power tools
Furniture – Couches – Chairs – Tables
Metal Halide Lights – Books
Motorcycles and Parts – Cars – Bicycles
Wood – Metal – Fans – Heaters
Kitchen Stuff – Blender – Coffeemaker
2002 Ford Th!nk Electric Vehicle
1987 Peugeot 505 Sedan (low mileage, runs great!)
Electric Vehicle Parts (motors, controllers, etc)
Solar Inverters – RGB LED Rope Lights
Video Projectors – Electrostatic Air filters

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

We’ve been anticipating this production for a while, and it’s finally ready – Arduino The Documentary is, well, just that. Just watch it

Where to begin….?

For starters, if you don’t know what a Leslie Speaker is, click here, then come back.

Over at Beavis Audio Research (one of my favorite places for circuits, effects, amps, oscillators, and sonic glee and madness) he has tried to build a rotating speaker using a beer can.

Why would one try to do this? I’m not going to comment on that because I do dumb crap too, all the time, in the name of science…otherwise known as just killing time and keeping my brain out of trouble.

Just when I wondered if the world needed yet another Arduino clone, along comes one that I actually need. It comes unsoldered, which is great for end use versatility. It has the usual Arduino connector footprint so will work with shields. It doesn’t have USB on board which saves money and height. It’s red and has flames (of course that’s a selling point for me – YMMV) All that for $13! This is pretty sweet.

From the EMSL site:
“Diavolino (“little devil”) is a low-cost, easy to build Arduino-compatible development board.

Diavolino has the form factor of an Arduino Duemilanove or Arduino Pro, but with nicely rounded corners and a striking appearance.

It’s a low-profile through-hole version, with a simplified design. It’s based on a ATmega328P microcontroller, and comes pre-flashed with the Arduino bootloader. Open source design, with bare basics hardware.”

Go buy one by clicking here.

Over at Beavis Audio they’ve posted a page of handy schematics. I love keeping schematic blocks like this within easy reach as I always seem to need a quick and simple oscillator, amplifier, or filter of some sort.

From the post:
“With all the bits of schematic goo I’ve been obsessively drawing over the years, it seemed like a good idea to put some of the fragments and misc blocks up on a page. Here it is: Blocks and Fragments. I’ll update this page over time as I draw up new things. Note that most are fragments and some are unverified, but there should be some useful bits in there for you.”

Kinetic sculptor Aaron Geman is showing a wonderful new kinetic piece at Mercury20 Gallery in Oakland. I think the title is “Parallelotree and the Mechanical Wind”, don’t quote me yet though – we’re looking into it.

This is something I have been hoping to see (but smart enough to not try to do myself) ever since I first saw someone using TELEO modules way back when. But when I saw TELEO I knew I wanted something more, and different (and hopefully at a much lower price.) The TinkerKit is currently under development, and is not yet commercially available. We will certainly be following the project’s progress with bated breath…or is that bated blogging?

Lifted from the TinkerKit website:
TinkerKit is an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals.

The interest in physical computing as an area in development within the creative industries has been increasing rapidly. In response to this Tinker.it! is developing the TinkerKit to introduce fast iterative physical computing methodologies to newcomers, and particularly design professionals.

What is the TinkerKit made of?

The TinkerKit is currently composed of about 30 different parts: 20 different types of sensors, 10 actuators. There is also a set of Arduino-compatible hubs. Each part of the TinkerKit has a standard connector that can be connected through a standard cable to a main hub.

These hubs include:

- A sensor hub for the Arduino (this is a shield that sits on top of the Arduino and allows the sensors to be connected easily).
- A keyboard emulator (which converts any input from the sensors into keystrokes).

At the moment, the sensors included as part of the TinkerKit are:
- Tilt Sensor
- 3 Axis Accelerometer
- Bend Sensor
- 1 Axis Gyroscope
- Hall Sensor
- Infra Red Distance Sensor
- LDR Light Sensor
- 2D Compass
- Rotary Potentiometer
- Capacitative touch Sensor
- PIR Sensor
- Touch Slider
- Touch Wheel
- Ultrasound distance sensor
- GPS
- Encoder
- Linear potentiometer
- Piezo

Shamelessly lifted off our pal, Bre Pettis

Bre Pettis just blogged about a new Arduino variant, called the “O’Baka” made by Kimio Kosaka (baka means “stupid” in Japanese, evidently)

Click here for the project’s website.

Applied Kinetic Arts’ show at the Y2Y gallery closes this Friday. The Y2Y Gallery is located at Jeff King & Company, 251 Balboa Street, in San Francisco.

Stay tuned for AKA’s next show, where and whenever that might be.

There’s this very cool site, called Electronics-Lab.com, and they have a very cool new thing, and that’s a whole lot of nice looking electronics stock photos, all for free. This is great stuff for creating lessons, Instructables, brochures, or anywhere you may need such pictures.

Oh, and yes, the picture on this post is from their collection.

I plan to write more about Electronics-Lab.com in future posts.

Several times a week I get asked by someone what I recommend as the best/easiest/quickest/least expensive way to learn about electronics. Some people learn best in a classroom environment, but a lot of people don’t have the time, or the money to do that. My standard recommendation for self study has been, for quite a while now, a 300-in-1 Electronics Learning Lab (so called because they contain parts and instruction for 300 different circuit lessons), and a good book. Both can be had for a total of less than $100.

The book I recommend is Paul Scherz’ “Practical Electronics For Inventors” a wonderfully complete tome that is of use from the very beginnings into experthood. The link above is to the second edition. Note that used copies of the first edition are available at very good prices, and it is still a very fine book.

As far as my recommendation for the kit goes, there are two on the market – I call them the black one and the white one. The black one comes from Radio Shack, and I can highly recommend it as I have owned one for years. The two part manual (a good basic electronics reference in its own right) was written by Forrest Mims. The kit can be purchased online, or in most Radio Shack stores for around $70. More info at RadioShack.com

The other unit on the market is available all over the place…but be careful. In my recent searches I found it priced anywhere from $80 to $130 – yes, a $50 swing on the exact same item. The average price is somewhere around $100. I know a lot of this particular kit gets sold, and I know that there are happy customers out there, but I have no personal experience with it. From looking at the list of 300 projects the two kits look very, very similar. Here’s the best deal I found on the white kit.

One last thing – neither of these kits contain nor discuss microcontrollers. They are for learning basic analog and digital electronics. The stuff they’ll teach you will come in very handy, though, if and when you decide to try your hand at microcontrollers.

The ever super and incomparable Violet Blue has a new blog called Art Machines, with the tagline “the art of the machine, and the machines of art”. As you can well imagine I sat up and took notice, being crazy about machines and all. Anyway go take a look, and subscribe, and enjoy!!!

As is my way these days, here’s last minute notice that Roboexotica 2008 starts this week. You see, I have been working like crazy to get a new piece ready for it. My piece is called The RimShotBot – it tells punchlines, and/or GWBushisms, or whatever I want it to, and gives itself a rimshot every time. I can also summon rimshots on cue when needed. It looks like this:

And more pix will appear in this photoset as they happen.

Kinetic art show, this Friday, 6-8PM, Y2Y Gallery at Jeff King & Company, 251 Balboa Street, in San Francisco.

See you all there, I hope!

Hiya folks!

This Sunday, September 28th, a grand event is to be held in Santa Rosa, California. It’s called The Great West End & Railroad Square Handcar Regatta & Exposition of Mechanical & Artistic Wonders. It’s free to get in, and perfect for all ages. Info on our favorite stuff can be found here. You can easily navigate to the main part of the site, as well as specific info and directions from there.

The gang I’ve come to consider family, who built the Steampunk Treehouse last year, created a 10 foot diameter hamster wheel for humans called The Lumbering Contraption (pictured above). It is set to compete in the handcar races on the railroad tracks at the event.

I hope to see you all there!

photo 1 – Bena Currin
photo 2 – Nick Winterhalter

Beat Box by Toru Kawarazaki

Yoichi Nagashima from SUAC (Shizuoka University of Art and Culture) just presented a lot of the work his students have done over the years using physical computing. There is a very rich web archive of the work, go look.

Nathan Seidle, owner of Sparkfun Electronics, thinks very hard about something.

I am sitting at the Sketching in Hardware 08 conference, being held this year at RISD in Providence, R.I. This is the third annual Sketching conference, and my third as well. I will be posting links to interesting stuff that gets presented here. My presentation isn’t until Sunday so I have some more time to work on it.

“Sketching in hardware is the process through which we understand the capabilities of emerging hardware technologies.

However, that may now be changing. Miniaturization, power-reduction and knowledge embedding enable smart components that abstract much of the low-level engineering complexity, while keeping the capabilities of the technology accessible and affordable to people outside of heavy industry. This has re-created the possibility of vernacular technology that can be built from smart parts. People who would otherwise be unable to directly engage with digital technology tools can now augment, manipulate, experiment, build, explore. In other words, sketch. “

Holy Moly!!!! I’ve been so busy getting ready for the annual Fire Arts Festival that I forgot to tell you all about it. Two more nights left – tonight and tomorrow. 7th Street, West Oakland, Near BART. Loads of pix online already.

More info at The Crucible’s website.