Archive for December, 2010
Robot dances to Jane Fonda
Andi, Dave and I pulled together this animation for our Comm lab animation project. It needs some fixing. We found Jane Fonda’s video and fell in love. I guess we decided to go ridiculous – why would a robot need exercise, after all?
DABA girls
D.A.B.A is the short film that I made with 4 others. It portrays the ongoing story of Dating a Banker, Anonymous, which was covered in the NY Times, and became a large internet meme (mostly in the blogosphere as women collaborated with others for support). The DABA phenomenon was about women who were dating bankers during the 2007 Wall Street collapse, and had to learn how to live with their newly-not-as-well-off-anymore boyfriends lost money. We filmed this at my mother’s psychoanalysis office, at McDonald’s, on Wall Street, and other various locations. We spent a day at David’s friend’s house editing it.
These red Prada shoes played an integral part of the film.
Byte Light
Jack and I collaborated to make ByteLight, which is an interactive light fixture that represents a giant LCD pixel. People can manipulate R, G, and B values of the pixel by flipping on and off 24 switches, which represent individual bits.
In the video above, someone flips the switches on and off, and watches the ambient light change color. The user can look up at the light fixture and see what happens to individual R, G, and B values when different combinations of switches are enacted, and the projected light color from the mixed R, G and B lights shows the color output of the pixel. It is possible to play and interact in a fun and compelling way, and also to experiment with bit data to gain a more comprehensive understanding.
Here are some images from our process:
see here for more
ByteLight update
We finished our R, G, and B strips (each with about 45 LED’s), and we hooked them up to the bench power supply. We are feeding voltage through the breadboard, then through both the Arduino V-in, and through two adjustable voltage regulators (LM317) – then through three transistors. One goes to green and blue LED strips, which each ideally require about 3-3.5 V, and one goes to the red LED strip, which requires about 2.5 V.
Here we are testing the lights. It took us a little while to figure out how to get the brightness of each color to be more calibrated – since the red ones require less voltage, we realized we’d need an extra voltage regulator.
We got white glossy plexiglass which we will sand to look matte. With about 4’x4′ we should be set, although we have much extra. We will use AMS to cut out the parts for the light fixture (a box roughly 20″x20″x4″) and a box to contain all the switches, the arduino, the wiring, and the breadboards (roughly 35.5″x4″x4.625). I made the templates using Illustrator.
269 Canal street is a decent place to get parts. We got a power adapter that goes up to 5 Amps, so we should have enough with that to get the desired voltage and amperage for the LED’s.