An ambient kinetic sculpture that reacts to the amount of light around it. It always pulses up and down, but as there is more light, the leaves arch higher, and as there is less light, they pulse gently up to a low angle.
In this video, the light is strong, and then I am blocking the light sensor to simulate a dark room.
Ideas Taking Shape: Sundial: Process
As many warned me, muscle wire is a tricky material.
It reacts to direct voltage quite happily (if you have the correct equation of resistance per inch etc. in place) - but if you are sending voltage / input from the Arduino, it is not happy as the Arduino does not supply enough current. It only reacts in tiny amounts unless it is getting a huge amount of current (especially with several pieces of M.W.). It also is not happy holding its bended position for a long period of time - the most problematic thing in my last post’s proposed design.
After experimenting a bunch I decided that I want to take more time to explore this material. Instead, I am returning to initial product sketches and tried and true materials.
My goal through this project has been:
- to see where the sun is throughout the day
- throughout the year
- understand its position in terms of cardinal directions
I now have prepared my object and done a mockup using the planned materials:
- sun path in veneer, a material that lets just the right shine of light through and speaks to the concept of understanding things outside while inside -
- mounted on a base with compass rose for orienting the direction of the object / sun path (must point South for proper reading)
- base box size allows for Arduino and Breadboard
- RTC clock working happily on BB
- yellow LEDs strung up from the breadboard through a foam core pre-cut with holes matching the LEDs position in the Arc Veneer top
- sides made with veneer mounted on felt
- top / bottom spacing secured by 4 small poles
Size:
- handheld: such that an average person could wrap his or her hands around the sides of the circle while it’s on a desk or table.
I am not representing the full circle of the sun because it is this very location-specific view that I am illustrating.
Further products could explore the addition of the moon and a full circle.
Exploring the compass rose illustration… found some really inspiring drawings:
Ideas Taking Shape: Final: Process
General idea - leaves curling over, wires contained in light beech wood box - creating a small desktop piece.
Ideas Taking Shape: Final: Process
Improvements to the reaction of the muscle wire… using multiple “hour” / “month” inputs from the Arduino, filtering through the tip120
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61mutLAT4mQ
Ideas Taking Shape: Final: Process
Update:
I prototyped my initial idea for showing the path of the sun through the sky throughout the year.
This initial idea had been made up of 12 months/layers, each laser cut with the sunpath as the bottom arc and holes for each hour along that arc. These holes are according to the number of hours in that month and according to the sun’s position at that precise hour.
LEDs light up at the sunlight hour and the month (so for example, in the November arc, and at 10 a.m.).
Having shown it to a lot of people and looked at it a lot myself, I still do not think it communicates all of the information very well. 
Over the weekend and the beginning of this week, I have been working with muscle wire and think it could be the right medium for this project.
The concept behind it is:
Each hour is represented by a flower petal (24 in total, per month).
On the first hour of sunlight (7 a.m. for November), the 7 a.m. position petal curls back. Et cetera until 4 p.m. when the sun sets and all of the petals that had opened will close back to their original position.
As before, the actual arc length and shape is important to me, therefore each month will have a different containing arc.
There will be a full circle of petals, but only the hours of sunlight petals will be activated.
I am going to start with One Month and prepare the full hour wheel, so 17 normal petals and 7 muscle wire petals, and build from there.
In the below sketch, the pink are the muscle-wire incorporated, sun activated petals, and the blue will always stay still as they are the no-sun hours.
Rough tests:
I plan to contain the wiring and Arduino underneath the flower, in a thin plywood box that would sit comfortably on a desk or table - or could be mounted on the wall.
A lot of thinking through the process left me in the plan to begin with just one month.
See various possibilities:
In other news, the laptop stand!
Muscle Wire
Jie Qi taught Sophie and me about muscle wire yesterday. She is a fantastic teacher. We had so much fun! The pleasure of mixing electronics with craft… sewing the muscle wire into place, adjusting its placement with copper tape circuits…
To start with, we figured out how much muscle wire to use based on the voltage we were going to use (a 5v power source). Using Ohm’s law (V = I / R) and research as to how many amps the muscle wire takes, (we used 0.006 HT Flexinol), we calculated that our target length was 9.6 inches. We cut our 9.6 inch pieces in half to have more material.
Then we crimped the ends of the muscle wire because it is easier to solder the crimp than to solder the tiny end of the muscle wire.
Next we soldered the muscle wire into place on the copper tape circuit. It’s important to try to have the muscle wire tightly in place so that when you apply voltage and it tightens further, the interaction is swift.
We also sewed the muscle wire into its place in the paper so that the paper would be fully reactive rather than just pulling at either end.
Above you see the sewn paper / muscle wire, and the copper tape circuit connecting the two pieces of muscle wire (the total length of 9.6 more or less, to resist the 5V coming in properly).
Another circuit photo - this is the back of each panel:
Applying voltage, curling up!
Ideas Taking Shape: Sundial: Process
Sketches of how this could be… the arcs, where the arcs could sit, how the LEDs would climb the legs of the arc.
More details, thinking through the months… front view and side view:
Maybe having a tilted based would give the same understanding of the change in the arc / day etc?
I found a website that models the path of the sun throughout the year to model solar energy options.
It produces drawings like these:
I traced these and created thin arcs, with wholes where the hours are. I am lasercutting each arc, putting together a small arch structure where the LED wiring could fit behind the arcs and the LEDs would shine through each hole at the appropriate time.
Here is that sketch, with the arcs in month order. See how the arch changes throughout the year.
It makes more sense to go with an order that reflects the order of the sun throughout the year though:
I also tried piling up the above arches - one on top of the other - out of curiosity - though this would not be a feasible design because the light would not come through to the front if it were December or January.
Subtract…
Subtract
Subtract
And then the Arduino component of the clock - using Processing first, just to get a feel for the parsing, and then the Real Time Clock module. My tape tags show that the date is parsing correctly (It was 7:30 p.m. and November when I was testing).
Two models:
Without “data”
Some of the “real” sunpath models:
Ideas Taking Shape: Final
FINAL PROJECT:
For my final, I am going to make a small, desktop sundial - season - clock.
There will be an arching wire for every month with LEDs along the wire. The LEDs mark the hours throughout the day, along the arch of the wire, mirroring the sun’s path through the sky each day. This description of the sun’s path is detailed - if it is a new month, the LEDs along a new wire will light up - demonstrating how the sun’s path changes throughout the year.
The structure would be wrapped in rice paper or another slightly textured paper to mask the wiring underneath and diffuse the light from the LEDs slightly - such as the tea filters I used in my Light Jars.
My rough mockup / starting to understand the wire spots through the year.
For example, currently the sun rises south of east and south of west - not exactly in the east or exactly in the west.
I am deciding between several formats:
1. Full detail: every month, every hour. (12 arches, approx. 144 LEDs)
2. Part: every month, but rather than hourly, it would be chunk of hours (morning, middle, afternoon) (12 arches, approx 48 LEDs)
3. Part: seasons, every hour. There would be an arch per season, and LEDs lighting up every hour. (4 arches, 144 LEDs).
4. Detailed LEDs: for each part of the day, the LED colors would have variations: white+yellow (early morning), bright yellow (midday), or white/yellow/purple/blue/red (sunset).
5. Detailed LEDs + Internet info: if the day is cloudy, rainy, the LEDs will be yellow throughout the day. If bright and sunny, the LEDs will be white throughout the day. If the pollution index is high, the sunset colors will be particularly rainbow-like (according to the theory that the more polluted the day, the more glorious the sunset).
Rough trial: LEDs lighting up according to time of day / month.
This would live on desks, in living areas, in schools, and teach us about our environment at the same time as it added information to our days in an ambient, subtle way.
Other ideas on sunlight:
Untitled (for the Sun) by Jim Campbell - a clock that displays time as a percentage.
“Beginning at 0 at sunrise, the five-digit display shows the percentage of daylight already spent, reaching 99.999 at sunset… because time is measured by the length of daylight, the clock (or ‘time’) runs faster in the daytime in the winter then in the summer.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EKIuhCwY_Q
Kota Nezu has an interesting device: a “Planetary Parasol”:
http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com/2011/05/planetary-parasol-tells-time-direction.html
