FUTURE BLINDNESS

Buddy, last night I fulfilled a commitment I made to a bar in my area. I am not bragging, but I thought you should know.

I have some updates on other projects as well:

I’ll be making more progress on the Cameroon project once I’ve got the dorkbot commitments. Fortuitously, Chelly will be in the States this Christmas, allowing me to push the deliverable deadline back to late December. Shit is going to be bananas at work and getting a grad school app ready, so it is nice to have the extra time (although admittedly, this project has been very slow to gain momentum).

The flower project is going well but will require some real work this weekend making a final decision about the actuators. Either they’re going to be embedded in each petal, which may diminish mobility, or they’re going to be somewhere else and I’ll use monofilament to transfer motion. Using monofilament would be a bit of a defeat, though, since it really obviates the need for muscle wire - I could do it with servos.

Excitingly, there’s a new (and hopefully easy) project that might prove more immediately rewarding—there was a call at the last Dorkbot meeting for an interactive audio exhibit for the kids to enjoy during the opening reception. I’m going to make a small patch of flowers that react to presence and produce (hopefully spooky) sounds. More on that soon.

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.