Creative Technology, Arduino, Robotics, Prototyping
Below are three small sketches, that use interactions with physical technologies. They are sensory and wholly simplistic, focusing on how we might use technology to alter and rethink these small moments of life.
Grow you a jungle was created with the intention of bringing a little simple joy and life to the process of watering plants. Being indoors you start to forget how alive everything truly is. I wanted this project to bring a bit of the lush movement of nature to the indoors.
This project was all about the action of watering a plant and how I might change that interaction. So I created a water can that triggers a video projection and a cacophony of nature sounds. I wanted to keep the whole rig very simple. This project was completed using a watering can, an Arduino Micro, a very simple circuit, and a little P5.
Grow You a Big Web of Wires is a simple project built from copper tape, an Arduino Micro, lots of LED lights and a mess of wires. I wanted to explore what our homes and indoor spaces might look and feel like with the artifice of nature. This project was part sculpture, part installation and part futures imagining.
I knew that I wanted to recreate some traditional house plants from our homes. Then went to source some wire at the hardware store and came back with 8 meters of galvanized steel wire and a huge roll of copper tape.
The final plan was to create a plant that would light up when you interacted with it. The copper tape would enable that connection.
It was easy to create the proof of concept, however, there was much testing to be done with the copper tape once it was formed into the leaves and attached to the LED’s. There was a lot of real world problems once the circuit was connected. Sometimes the copper didn’t make a connection, sometimes the LED wires didn’t connect in the breadboard. It ended up taking a lot of troubleshooting and patience to come up with a setup that would work every time.
This project was a collaboration between Amreen Ashraf, Olivia Prior and myself.
Synchrobots are randomly choreographed machines that attempt to move in synch with each other. The bot’s receive the same commands to start and stop their wheels. But the differences in weight, shape, and environment cause them to fall out of synch. Little bots dancing together, leaving the viewers to delight in what they will do next.
For this project we networked together 3 Adafruit feathers, and set them atop, 2 Feetech FT-MC-001 Kits, that would form the base of our little bots, and used 4 servo motors to make our little bots move!