Motor Blog

These things cost about $200. Not the projector, the thing on top of it. It’s a projector dowser, and basically what it’s designed to move a paddle in front of a projector to keep it from projecting video black when you don’t want it to. At it’s core, it’s really just a motor that moves a dowel by 90°. And it costs $200.

I wanted to see how I could make one on my own, and possibly make it for cheaper. I wanted to start small, so I ordered some tiny servo motors. I figured that for this project I would use the smallest motor that I could, and use it to douse a tiny pico projector. Hopefully I’ll be able to take what I learn from this project and make my own larger scale dowser that is both cheaper than what’s commercially available and controllable by a switch or through an Arduino.

So I got a servo motor, and a dial that was specifically meant to operate it. The first problem I ran into was that the motor and the controller both ran on 4.8v power. I assumed that it would be fairly easy to convert 9v to 4.8v, but as it turns out…

Only one of these lights is supposed to be on. it’s flashing because, I think, it’s getting too much voltage.

Converting voltage is more complicated than I had thought. So I made the decision to move forward on this project using a power supply.

Ok, that works. Now I need a structure to mount the motor to, which I cut out on the jigsaw.

Ok, that fits in there quite snugly. If I cut this out correctly, it should fit right onto the Pico Projector I’m testing on.

Closed…

Open!

And ok! That’s a functioning motor mount. I’ll just use some corner brackets to mount a side piece for the controller, and then I think we’re good to go.

If I were to do this again, I would prioritize having the correct power supply for my motor, which is something I didn’t consider until too late. I also would have tried to find a way not to have the Servo running

Combining Materials

If nothing else, this project taught me a valuable lesson about cutting metal: it’s a nightmare. Don’t do it if you don’t have time for it.

I’m in big screens this semester, and my group is starting to think that it would be fun to have some physical interaction to go along with our big video game. We’re thinking that, as groups play our game, they will add pieces to a circular cutout that will eventually form a flower. I wanted to make a small-scale prototype for this version. I started by designing the wood outline.

And then I cut it out on the Bantam mill.

Ok, that worked out pretty well. I then reversed the design and contracted it inwards by .1” for the copper pieces that would fill in the pockets in the wood.

I had two 6”x 6” sheets of copper to cut for the petals. Unfortunately, I don’t have good documentation of the process of cutting them down to fit into the Bantam mill, but it was a bit of an ordeal. I nearly cut it all the way through, but I deformed the sheet as I tried to cut the last bit. In retrospect, I should have used the tool of the week. And while the process of cutting the copper pieces felt like it started off ok…

My first pass didn’t cut all the way through. And my second pass didn’t go so well.

And honestly, this is where I’ve chosen to call it for this week. I’ll be sticking with this project through the final, so updates will be coming.

Update 12-4

Copper may be difficult to cut, but you know what’s easy to cut? Paper. This project now has a paper inlay.

Enclosure

Sometimes the wheel needs to be reinvented. And sometimes it needs to be re-reinvented. For this week’s enclosure project, I remade the enclosure that I tried to remake last week.

I had tried to make a box out of acrylic by gluing the corners together. This time, I wanted to be able to open it and re-open it. I started this week by looking up the correct brackets I’d need on McMaster Carr.

I bought several brackets, 6-32 style screws, and 3” standoffs. I then made sure that every piece of my box had correctly-sized holes for the screws, and correctly-spaced holes for the brackets.

And when I cut out these new pieces everything fit together and could be dis-assembled and re-assembled. It was a huge relief after trying to glue everything perpendicularly last week.

Some parts of it, though, still did need to be glued. The translucent runners that were built to house my Neopixels were too small and delicate for my brackets. For those pieces, I used acrylic weld.

And for the Neopixels themselves, I made tiny holes in the enclosure with the hopes of being able to use thread to sew the strips onto the enclosure. This wound up being an awful lot more time-consuming than I had predicted.

My end result is a much nicer-looking enclosure for my project. In order to make the project functional again, I’ll need to re-make a lot of the PComp elements, but given that that’s outside of the scope of this class, I feel pretty good leaving it here.

Laser Cutter

My enclosure project is going to take two weeks to finish. It’s a bit of a doozy.



This is a box that I made for my Live Image Processing and performance last year. It’s janky. It’s delicate. It causes problems when I try to take it through airport security. It needs an enclosure.

The enclosure will have two distinct parts made of different materials. It will have an exterior made of wood and an interior made of acrylic This week, for my laser cutter project, I will make the interior part of the enclosure.

I started off by opening up my old project. Last year, I used it to cut black cardboard. This time around I’ll be using acrylic, which will help reduce friction and hopefully make it easier to use. I’ll be modifying it by adding inlays for the lights to live. Exposed neopixels might be a nice aesthetic for ITP, but this thing has a frustrating tendency to fall apart.

I think this project might take me a while, so I will finish this post once I’ve completed the project.

I cut out my entire sheet at once, which you advised us not to do. I guess I’m a rebel.

Using wooden clamps to hold it in place as the acrylic weld dries. and that brace looks… oddly familiar.

The long, slow, annoying process of gluing everything together

Repeatable Pieces

I wanted to make some interconnecting block pieces.

I think it’s fun to take repeating objects and make something unique with them, so for this project I chose to make 5 copies of a wooden piece that could be assembled into fun shapes. Essentially, I tried to make a prototype for large-scale Legos.

I started with fairly basic materials, 2 4’ 2x4’s and 3 4’x1 1/8” wooden dowels. I wanted to make the dowels into pegs on either side of the 2x4’s, and make them different lengths on either side. I would give the boards pockets for the dowels to slide into.

I started by marking 1’ sections on my 2x4’s, then marking off every 2” in those sections for drill pockets.

I didn’t use a stop or a jig to cut the boards. I only needed to cut 6 pieces, so it felt just as easy to just cut it on the lines I had drawn.

For the pegs, however, I needed ten pieces of 4”, and ten pieces of 5 ½”. Free-handing that would take way too much time. So I measured out the right distance from the blade on the miter saw, and clamped down a spare piece to act as a stop.

Once I had everything cut, I needed to use the drill press to make my pockets. I loaded the press with a 1 1/8” Forstner bit (which exactly matched my dowels) and set the height on the press to drill into a 2x4 about ½” deep. I set up a stop to be able to drill into my boards at 2” in from the edge, 4” away from the edge, And dead center, or 6” away from the edge.

After that, I sanded each board to take away corners.

from then, it was pretty straightforward to drill each dowel into place.

And there it is! The pieces can be re-arranged in multiple configurations.

I think if I had to do this again, I would have spaced the dowels out more to allow for a greater variety of configurations. I also would have used wood glue – I had assumed that a screw would be enough to keep a dowel in place, but some of these pieces are still pretty loose.

Flashlight Blog

Last year I built a combination camera stand/programmable lamp for a subtraction project. A ring of Neopixels made up the camera’s main lighting element, and three knobs were meant to be able to adjust RGB values for the light. An Arduino in the base was meant to interpret the signals coming in from the knobs as well as provide a programming interface for use in live performance.

The programming interface worked. I was able to hook that Arduino up to a computer and control the lights in the Neopixel ring. It was pretty cool.

The knobs did not work. The signal coming from each of them should have worked in theory, but in practice the signal was just too dirty. After hours spent soldering and re-soldering, I gave up on the project. I now have a semi-functional lamp that still sits on my desk today.

The tape is not decorational.

But that was last year. This year, I’m going to nail it. I’ve got some more experience under my belt. I know how to solder. I’m going to make a lighting instrument with three knobs to control RGB values.

I bought all of the things I would need for it: a 9-volt battery holder, a rocker switch, three rotary potentiometers, a new breadboard, USB to Micro-USB converters and an Arduino Nano. Excessive? Maybe. Way more than I would have spent on a regular flashlight? Absolutely. Worth it? We’ll see.

Step one, of course, was to get everything working on a bread board. I wanted to get the fundamentals of this thing working before I built the enclosure around it, just to be sure that I knew everything would fit.

And it worked! As I turned each knob, I got a range of input values reading out from the Arduino. Step two, then was to solder each of these things to a perf board and make sure that the same setup worked.

…Less luck. I replicated a basic potentiometer circuit on the board, but I’m not getting anything like a consistent signal. And this was just on the first one I tried; I still had two more to go. Plus, this thing would ultimately need to be battery-powered, but the Nano can only be powered by USB, so I would need to cut open a cable and attach the positive and ground pins to my board and…

You know, this isn’t going to work. It’s time to pivot.

Here’s what I’m planning to go as for Halloween.

His name is Blucifer. He once killed a man (look it up). He’s a legend in Colorado. He also has red light-up eyes that, when attached to a mask, would technically fulfill our qualifications for a flashlight.

I got my lighting element from Canal Lighting and Parts. As of 5 PM on Friday, I’m waiting for a horse mask to arrive from Amazon.

I’ll be updating this once I’ve finished the project.

…and now for some updates.

It turns out that rubber is pretty difficult to cut. Step one in this new process was cutting out some eye holes.

Which I eventually got done after a bit more cursing than one might expect. Step two was attaching the LED rope with some tacky glue and paperclips.

The original battery pack didn’t extend nearly far enough to reach my pocket, so I soldered some wires together.

And, ultimately, I wound up with a light up horse head mask!

Is it a “flashlight” in a traditional sense? No. Is it a portable device that makes light? Yes.

Mission accomplished.