FUTURE BLINDNESS

DORKBOT HALLOWEEN07

Originally uploaded by AKA MEDIA SYSTEM

The opening tonight went well—many thanks to all who attended!

Pictured here is the final product. I think the form turned out well, and I certainly learned many lessons in different media. The flower initially deployed flawlessly and worked for over an hour with no intervention from me. I’ll detail in a later update the means by which I ensured that the auto-destruct feature of previous flower incarnations was successfully deprecated.

After I had been away from the flower for awhile, I came back and noticed it was stuck in the “on” position—not good for anyone! After twenty minutes of frustrating, in-public debugging I discovered that the 9v battery had more or less drained completely; tomorrow I’ll need to deliver a 9v AC power supply, and perhaps once I post the schematic and/or breadboard photos someone can point out the error in my circuit that causes the excessive drain.

Watching strangers interact with the flower was pretty enlightening. I certainly regret that I had to compromise on the original interaction design in order to complete the schematic on time. In the final hours of Googling for an answer (peep my del.icio.us to see the link density/time relationship change as we approach opening night) I realized I should have had the circuit ready way sooner than the physical proto…so now I know.

One significant upside to this project is that it’s eliminated the inertia that I felt was keeping me from making acceptable progress on the Cameroon project. The flower circuit is my first foray from hardware hacking into the realm of microcontroller/logic projects, and I feel much more comfortable delving into a non-555 project with this under my belt.

Well, the flower project hit a snag when the dragon skin I molded turned out to be too thick for the muscle wire to move—in the course of figuring this out, I think I may have damaged/overheated some of the wire segments.

Most of the wire is undamaged, though, and it was easy to retrieve the other wires from the silicone.

Now I’m using a much thinner and lighter strategy involving a plastic flower I got at a craft shop. The downside here is that now I’ve got a shot at making a flower that magically sets itself on fire.

My new form factor also means there’s no inbuilt means to force the wire back into a bent position when it’s unactuated - I’ll have to work out something there once the silicone has cured. It won’t be pretty.

The other bad part: so far, I have not got a circuit working - I initially ordered too few/the wrong parts. Now I’m using a relay from an old robotics project of my brother’s, but I’m concerned about the current drawn by each wire—to get them to react quickly you have to really juice them up, and I doubt my relay can handle the current drawn by 6 of these, not to mention where I’ll find a power source for all this.

The circuit I’ll worry about tomorrow. Tonight I’m not sleeping until I’m confident at least the form factor is correct and workable.

Friend, I’m making progress on this project. You can always check the flickr set here for the latest images.

Progress-wise, here’s what I’ve got left to do:

• Decide on the actual material to use for the final flower
• Figure out how the muscle wire will connect on either end, and where this will be - it seems now that molding my own silicone petals will not be feasible in my timeframe.
• Design the circuit - I have a photoresistor that would be easy to hook up to a small transistor circuit, but I’m not sure this’ll yield consistent results. Also, there’s a latching problem that I might want to try and solve with a timer.