A breadcrumb trail of project notes
The current plan to control the flow of water from the nozzles is to have spinning disks which interrupt the flow. Last week I cut some 5″ disks with 1/4″ mounting holes from acrylic using the laser cutter at NYU. I bought some Airpax LB82773-M1 5V 0.8A bipolar stepper motors from Jameco and some SN754410NE [...]
Read More..>>The Hydrobot performance will take approximately five minutes and represents a single cycle of the ocean from high tide to low tide and back again. It should give the feel of a good surfing session with high tide being dull, building waves as the tide ebbs eventually leading to poor conditions at low tide, then [...]
Read More..>>The LEMUR installation at the National Gallery in D.C. will have it’s last show on May 7th. But on May 6th there will be a special presentation of the complete 22 minutes of Ballet Mécanique and other works for the mechanical orchestra. If you haven’t seen the installation, it’s worth checking out, and I plan [...]
Read More..>>I made two short videos of the HydroBot for my NIME midterm presentation. (Need the latest QuickTime for the videos… sorry.) Walkthrough video (high quality .mov 28MB) Demo with sound from contact mic (high quality .mov 9.5MB)Walkthrough and demo together (medium quality 14MB .mov) Here is a sketch for what one of the nozzle arrays [...]
Read More..>>Some progress on the Hydro/SquidBot. I’m trying out different mounting techniques for getting the water spray to hit the bar perpendicularly. The bar wants to hang vertically, so that means the nozzle has to be parallel to the ground. The bar gets pushed around from side to side when the water is flowing, so I [...]
Read More..>>The premiere of Ballet Mécanique at the National Gallery of Art was incredible. The performance went flawlessly and there was a good crowd and good reaction. The setting was fantastic — smack dab in the mezzanine of the East Building along with works by greats like Calder, Max Ernst, and Andy Goldsworthy. At some point [...]
Read More..>>Some progress on the Hydrobot front. My thinking now is that I want to move the water more, and have the movement be more visible. The goal is to make the bot be itself a performer, and that requires the audience to understand what the bot is doing and have a feeling of tension. The [...]
Read More..>>The xylobots and bass drum bots are done! Pictures of the completed bots should be available shortly. Awesome to see them actually making some music! Now we just need to get ready for their run of Ballet Mécanique at the National Gallery of Art in DC (March 12 through 29). A huge amount of work [...]
Read More..>>HydroBot: Proposal For A Water-Based Musical Robot
Read More..>>