Local killbot proprietors, Survival Research Labs is having a show! It’s this Saturday (July 24, 2010) in Petaluma, at the Petaluma River Heritage Center (260 Water St, Petaluma). Admission is free, and is part of the Friends of the Petaluma River‘s Rivertown Revival.
It is going to be fun on the bun.
MIT has published a paper entitled Programmable Matter by Folding (full article) that describes paper that can fold itself into a variety of shapes. The paper is covered by is divided into triangular sections that are joined by a network of thin nitinol actuators that contract under voltage. At the center of each section is a magnet that is used to retain the paper’s shape.
While I’m sure MIT had bigger plans for this tech (Well if it was the Media Lab, perhaps not.), I immediately thought that this was the perfect thing for synthetic plants. I’ve been thinking about how nitinol wires, or at least something like them, could deform a paper but thought that the being able to compresses only about 4% was a problem. When I first saw this video, I thought they were using something else besides nitinol, but they’re not. The trick they they used to get 180 degree bending is folding and annealing the 100μm foil so that the nitinol will remember the folded shape. Once it cooled, the foil is manually flattened, and then reheating the foil with electrical current will cause it return to the folded shape.
Guess it’s time to get some nitinol sheets.
Now this is nifty.
We Make Money, Not Art interviews, Gilberto Esparza about his Plantas Nómadas (Nomadic Plants), an autonomous walking robot that is powered by a combination of solar cells and a microbial fuel cell. When the fuel cell output drops beneath some threshold, the bot seeks out a water source, extends a proboscis and refills the fuel cell. Additional water is used nourish a colony of on board plants.
Gilberto’s earlier work is equally interesting. Parasitos Urbanos (Urban Parasites) (flashless site) was a series of robots inductively powered from electrical transmission lines that would move through the urban environment mimicking sounds they encounter.
Jim Blackhurst’s SmartLED SolarTherm is a minimalist information display. Consisting of an RGB LED, a watch, and an ATTiny25 microcontroller. The chip contains a temperature sensor whose reading is displayed as light pulses. According the comments on Makezine, the internal temperature sensor is +/- 10 C (+/- 18 F), so its not very useful.
SolarTherm is simpar to M27′s Zach DeBord’s pummers. These charge a capacitor from a solar cell, and when the light level drops, the capacitor discharges, and causes an LED to blink.
While as an ambient displays these are visually interesting, especially Zach DeBord’s pummers, these seem to suffer from the main problem with all ambient displays. They trade simplicity for usefulness.
I want the display to be both pretty, but also informative. The display needs to be immediately interrogated. Similar to the how a grandfather clock provides a chime ever 15 minutes to an hour, but also can be viewed in order to learn the exact time. I’m thinking of something like Riedi and Gloor’s Weather Diorama.
Things like Nabaztag or the infinitely more endearing ,Michael Kaminsky and Paul Dourish‘s SWEETPEA (aka “The Microsoft Barney Paper”) are more confusing than anything. Even baseball signs aren’t that confusing.
Maybe the best ambient display I’ve seen was simply a string hanging from a DC small motor wired directly into an ethernet cable. As packets would pass, the motor would be powered, causing the string to wiggle. As the network activity increased, so would the vigorousness of the string’s dancing. The great thing about this display is that it’s immediately and intuitively interpretable, while something more complex requires the user to learn some of sign language.
This past weekend, Ming and I planted a couple of tomato plants in pots to grow. As part of the fun, we’re keeping a log of how fast the plants grow. Doing this has given me flashbacks to LDEF SEEDS experiment which involved both school children and “real” scientists growing tomatoes that were exposed to the radiation of space for almost six years. (FYI: Space seeds had higher germination rates, but tasted the same as Earth tomatoes.)
While thinking about plant growth rates, I came across Natural Selection by Tom Simpson of Studio Lithero. It is perhaps the most boring death race ever. (Actually, it’s pretty cool sped up.) Three plants enter. One plant leaves (HA!), and becomes president. Sensors at the top of the stand trigger cutters at the bottom.
Makes me want to breed some sort of super plant, á la the Russiansilver fox experiment.
Next Wednesday and Thursday, (Feb 17-18), at the DNA Lounge (“A disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morals”) (375 Eleventh St; SF) is BarBot 2010. Tickets are $10 advance, $15 day of show.
Come out and have iZac pour you a fuzzy navel, and the girliest drink in the house!
Last night was DorkbotSF 47 at TCHO. There were three speakers, Timothy Childs, founder of TCHO, talking about how they quantify chocolate and make small testing labs for the Peruvian jungle; Michael Ang (aka Mang) showing off some of his work like Strange Attractor, artificial flowers to attract butterflies, and Blue Flower, yet another LED flower. The highlight of the evening though was Mark Pauline of SRL revealing his plans to build an 8 foot spine robot with a spike on the end. The evening was streamed, so definitely watch Mark’s critique of other spine robots that have been built. It’s around 51:00.
Survival Research Labs wants volunteers. They’re looking for pretty much anything.
I saw an SRL performance at Zero1 back in 2006, “Ghostly Scenese of Infernal Desecration (Formally: Six Flags Over Hell).” It was very loud, and after the show, I dumbstruck. I remember walking back to the car thinking, “What the hell did I just see?” It was “interesting,” and I recommend it to anyone. (Video of the show after the jump.)
If SRL wasn’t in Petaluma, I would totally join.
In the 1970s the Soviet government, built a series of lighthouses around the Arctic Circle to aid in navigation. Since these were built in the most godforsaken parts of Siberia, they were not only automated, but nuclear powered. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people began to strip them for metal, including the radiation shielding.
When I read about this. I couldn’t help but think of Russia’s floating nuclear power plants, perhaps plying the seas past the lighthouses.
But, what I really think of when I see the sea ravaged edifice is something out of a Life Without People episode. Nuclear powered autonomous lighthouses guiding nuclear powered autonomous ships to ports, where where they are loaded with ore from continuous conveyors, that are supplied by autonomous freight trains, until the day that there’s just nothing left to load on the trains, or on the ships, and the entire system shuts down and rusts.
via JWZ
The Play Coalition created Plantbot, a servo powered planter. The idea is that the planter continuously tracks the sun, ensuring that the plant get maximal sunlight.
My initial impression was that this was a really cool idea, but when I started thinking about it, it seems like yet another one of those ideas that are utterly impractical. I mean, do you really want furniture that constantly moves? Well I guess a dog is kind of like that, but it doesn’t immediately back to the same place. In all honesty though, that’s an engineering problem. An accelerometer to detect pickup and not move for some time after being placed back down. I guess the other thing is having it move back to its original position each morning. Well, I guess that’s just a search pattern. So, I guess none of this is that big of a problem.
Adafruit links to Peter Sand‘s Fast Planting. (Alas, the video is broken.) Fast Planting is a track mounted robot for tending an herb garden. The cursor moves across and grabs interchangeable tool heads to plant, water, and trim the plants. Completely over engineered. ;)