IDLE HANDS

I’ve been wanting to make some art to put in the public space for a long time now. Probably since forever. Since I like sound and synthesizers that has been my focus-area.

What?
Imagine a small box, Almost like an altoids-box, but thinner. On that box there is a string and on the other side of the string there is a weight or a hook. This box is thrown up in a tree, dangling back and forth and sounding. This would be an electronic sound, probably a pure sine or a dirty square-wave. This sound changes in pitch as the tree moves in the wind and the day dawns or set’s. The box is not alone. It has friends, and they sound together, creating a wonderful cacophony of sounds. Now imagine that there are many of these trees, all around earth. Now imagine that you could be part of that creation.

How?
The boxes contain a speaker, a circuit to produce the sound and a solar-cell to get the electricity.

Objectives.
I want the circuit to be cheap to produce, real cheap, so cheap that you wont mind throwing a bunch of them up a tree.
I don’t want to put a light sensitive resistor in the circuit, I’d rather have the electricity gathered set the pitch.
I’d like this to be funded via kickstarter.com, that way ppl will be able to contribute and get the sound-making devices and I wont have to shell out loads of cache, but most importantly I will have found people around the world that likes this idea and will be able to put it into action.
It has to be environmental friendly, in this case, it means that it wont be impossible to get the sound making devices down and recycled.
Volume should be of a 30 something while male speaking, not louder or softer. I think that is a good volume that will both be heard but not tinnitus inducing.

Why is this not already on kickstarter?
I want to be able to present a working solution and have prices on the hardware before I go on kickstarter, and right now I’m still prototyping the sound-making circtuit, these are what I’ve tried:

* 555 oscillator: (Needs amplification and does not change pitch when starved)
* A Couple (two)  LED-blink circuits changed to talk to speaker instead of a LED (could not get to work, probably needs amplification)
* Four or so Hex schmitt trigger IC’s (I really like these, cheap IC’s, very moddable but they need amplification and does not handle battery-starve as I would like them to do).

Maybe I’ll try and find some 2ohm speakers, right now all I’ve tried with are 8ohm’s, perhaps then amp would not be needed.

Prices range between 10sek and 20 SEK, without the solar-cell (witch are about the same in price). Then add casing and we’re up at like 50-60 SEK. This will lower with volume ofcourse, but not by much.

I’ve been glancing at clockwork robot’s heliophone, but the schematic is using a 1381 voltage detector that is 1.75 USD in.

Help?
I need some help, good ideas about the casing and the amplification. Also a good place to source solar-cells would be awesome. Any thought on making PCB’s would also kick ass. I’d like the circuit to be easily modifiable so that everyone putting them up can add their own artistic touch if they please.

____________________________________________ some links

555 oscillator: http://www.piclist.com/images/www/hobby_elec/e_ckt5.htm

clockwork robot: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kinetic-arts/sculpture/gallery7/1.htm

My son and I wanted to make chilli-sauce, more him then me really. We’ve already experimented with adding chili to Hollandaise but to little sting in that. Lukas was disappointment.

This is what we came up with:

1: A handful of chillies, some dried since last year and some fresh.
2: An equal amount of garlic slices.
3: Some oil
4: Some salt
5: some honey.

Clean and rinse the chillies and the garlic. Remove the seeds from the chillies, put it in a bowl and mix it. (Lukas tasted one of the chilli seeds, then he drank a lot of water).

We keep ours in the fridge.

I ordered a small camera to mount on my longboard (since my last test proved awesome for keytarring but not for filming skateboards). That camera was ordered some weeks ago and have still not arrived (guess I’ll have to talk to paypal about that). So I went out and bought a Contour HD 1080.

The camera is cheaper then the GoPro but has fisheye and about the same specs. I really liked the connectors and the 720p in 60fps option. I’m falling in love with HD-movie, dont know how that happened. A few reviews I’ve read holds the Contour as the better camera, and a few the GoPro. The Contour was available when I had the itch so I got that.

The program that comes with … well, it’s not good. Let’s just leave it at that. It’s way WAY more limited then iMovie. huhuuhhh. Thankfully you get the camera as a removable drive so it’s up to you to use whatever program you like.

There comes two connectors with, one to tape stuck on to something, and one to put on your ski-glasses. I tried both on the longboard. At first both acted a bit flimsy, and liked to drop the camera. Really not ok. So even after drilling holes and securing the base the camera was dropped of. It’s a special feeling dragging a brand new camera on the concrete after your longboard. And what ever I tried it did not help, it still fell off. Enter overkill. So I stuck it on there really really hard. That resulted in really shaky videos and that the memory-card lost connection with the camera and then spazzing out and stop recording.

My solution to this was to go get some real super grade Velcro. I mean the new kind where there is only one type of connector. It worked great, the shakes are tolerable and the camera very seldom falls off.

What would a camera review be without some sort of video? lame!

My mother recently retired from her teaching job and while this is a good thing she misses the plant press she had acces to there. On another side I’ve recently bought a really really big plane cutter and I wanted to use it for more then planing wood for the longboards so me and the kids decided to make a plant press.

Having only seen these as a kid remaking them from memory might have been a bad idea, but it was not. I decided we should go for the simplest solution, pretty oak and wingnut.

First we planed the wood, you could probably use plywood, but that does not look as nice.

Then all we had to do was to drill some holes and test it.
Here are some images of us trying it out on basilica.

Here it is in it’s closed state, note the small whole in the middle, it’s so you shall be able to hang it on the wall, not a mistake. defensively not a mistake.

Opened

Ready for the press

This is how the basilica looks 2 days later.

Saw a video today with a guy using soap to get spraypaint not to stick on something you have already painted.

I wanted to se if i could get similar results with regular oil.

I guess the result say yes.

Sorry about the bad lightning on the photo.

I’ve been really awe’d by the GoPro Camera videos you can find out on the internet. That and the contraptions ppl use to put cameras on their guitars for music videos. So when I found these two items:

Both 10 SEK each, amounting to a total of … 20 SEK.

After removing the legs and adding a new screw and bold (I had this before so I wont add it to the spreadsheet) it looks something like this:

Not bad for 3 minutes of work, not bad at all. There even was a hole ready so I did not have to drill one.

So where to put it?

On a a longboard ofcourse, I’m a bit focused on those right now. This here is Lukas’s longboard so we went out and tried it out for a bit. the camera was to heavy and the mount to flimsy. No software could unshake that shakyness, so I mounted it directly on a board, like this:

The resulting video was still to shaky to be useful, but if I use it with the original grip and put it on a keytar, this is the sort of awesomeness that follows:

Sorry about the repetition of information, but you know you guy’s that read here get to know LOADS more!

A few weeks back I bought two longboards from teknikmagasinet. These longboards are hyped asa “new classic” and being great a great all round longboard.

As per usual I did not really buy in to the market-speak but bought them solely to use the cheap truck and wheels on the longboards I make for my kids. Since Tova already have “big wheels” on her I put them on Lukas longboard. Before I did that though, I took it for a ride, these are my conclusions.

When searching for Talawa longboard on the internets you only get references to Teknikmagasinet, no product page.

1: There is no flex in the board, not at all. It could have been made from metal instead. No affordance at all for anything but super smooth asphalt.

2: The trucks are mounted on big ass riserpads, these and the shape makes the trucks work like ploughs. no affordance for gravel or twigs where you ride. I have no clue why you would design your board like that.

3: The wheels that had been facing the window in the store where miscoloured. to much exposure to sunlight I guess, the felt about the same though so I guess it’s just cosmetical.

4: I tried to turn, but failed. The bushings are hard, like superhard. I wigh 86kg and I was unable to make the board tilt more then a few degrees. This is the opposite of my usual problem. Releasing the bushings does not help much. They where very hard anyways. Needless to say, Lukas had to have new bushings (he’s really lightweight, as a 6-year old should be)

Apparently these are the trucks and wheels:

Wheels: Ape Venom PU 65×51 mm/85A
Bearings: ABEC-7 Carbon
Trucks: Seagull 6″ (15 cm)

Hope you have better luck in finding information on these on the internet.

In conclusion, if you want cheap trucks and wheels, you can get this. Expect to have to grease up the bearings, and change the bushings. Just dont expect to be able to ride the thing from the store to your home.

A few days a go I bought a litte machine that cuts things. What’s special about this one is that it’s sort of like a breed between a CNC machine and a printer. It’s nice. A computer controlled knife.

My main thought was to use it to cut stencils for t-shirt prints and the such and just ignore the ready made materials the same company produces, more on this later.

The machine I got is pink. That’s nice. I think they are trying to dominate the whole scrap booking community. I’m not a scrapbooker, far from it.

There are a few setbacks thogh. 1 you need to change “caps” on the knife to set a maximum depth. 1,2 and 3mm are the ones you can choose. In the printing program it tells you what cap to put on. I often forget this. You also need to have most materials on a piece of mildly adhesive plastic sheet called “carrier sheet”. The carrier sheet helps out in the way that the cut out parts stick in place. But it get’s cut through and the glue dries away etc, so you need to exchange it.

The materials that the same company produces are real great though. I bought black vinyl and white vinyl and brown heat transfer for fabric (t-shirt’s).

So If you do something like this

1: Google some nice black and white images of the comic book heroine Vampirella

2: Get it into Inkscape and convert it to a path.

3: Export it to dxf that the machines accompanying program can read, thank you Inkscape for providing this.

4: Open it into the program, which is really good, to open inkscape files in and set the printer up. If you are able to do something cool in this program I salute you!

5: Print, remove the part’s that should not be there and iron on to your t-shirt.

Pretty Nice result’s.

I’ve used this machine on the Longboard from last post both with Vinyl and as cutout for the stencil.

Am I happy with this machine for 1890:- SEK? I am indeed!

I’ve have had vacation. 4 weeks of doing stuff.  Both bloggable and unbloggable things. Anyways, what I’m trying to say is, sorry for the lack of post’s lately. This one is going to be a short one aswell, but it will be an intro to a much longer one.

You see, I’ve been taking an interest in longboarding. I’ve have built about ten different boards these last two/three months. I’ve built two skateboard presses, the first one was outside while I was away and the rain destroyed it. preassure and moisture on wood is not a winning combination.

Later there will be post’s with images of the different boards, a few of them for my kids, a few for myself. And some just for the lulz.

Today I’m gonna show you the first one I pressed in my new press. And only the result. Not a how to.

One of the images in this animation will make a great CNC’ed piece.

I’ll just leave it here, and this is an automatic timed post. When you read this, I’ll be on my way home from Legoland. All happy and shit!