Michael Ang

My Blue Flower was featured in the Art Work column in MAKE Issue 10. The article is called Illuminated Circuits and focuses on artists who use electronic circuits for both their form and function. I’m in there along with Peter Vogel (one of my personal heroes).

The Spring Show is going to be wild. More than 100 projects. My Blue Flower made it in.

Interactive Telecommunications Program
Spring Show 2006

http://itp.nyu.edu/show/

Tuesday, May 9 from 5-9 PM
Wednesday, May 10 from 6-9 PM

721 Broadway at Waverly Place 4th Floor South Elevators New York, NY 10003

A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects from the student artists of ITP.

This event is free and open to the public. No need to RSVP.

The show at Tonic was a success! Hydrobot Mark I presented a short piece and nobody was electrocuted. Video hopefully soon!

The Materials and Building Strategies class at ITP had some great final projects. Also check out the great new Materials for New Media website.

Pictures from ITP Materials Final Spring 2006

Blue Flower by mangtronix as presented at ITP Materials Final

My blue flower will use inductive charging. I took apart an Oral-B CrossAction Power Max toothbrush ($18 at K-Mart) to see how it works and see if it would be useable in my project.

Charger hacking and coil construction pics

The toothbrush side is remarkably simple. There is a coil attached directly to a battery (no rectifier) and a switch which physically connects and disconnects the battery from the motor assembly. The motor appears to be similar to that used in a pager. The attachment on the shaft has an inverted cone offset from the axis of the motor that loosely connects to a metal rod that goes up to the toothbrush head. The design is very elegant, using a minimum of parts and materials.

The base is completely filled with an epoxy or rubber (finding epoxy is the hacker’s worst nightmare!) There is a circuit board that I didn’t free from the epoxy and coils of magnet wire. The magnet wire is formed into stranded wire and then coiled (as opposed to a simple bobbin of magnet wire). The base seems more or less useless for hacking because of all the epoxy. Interesting to see that the shape of the coil is pretty loose.

For my own inductive charger experiment I used 22ga magnet wire on a spool as the primary and 30ga magnet wire coiled around a screw as the secondary (in a transformer, power is transferred from primary to secondary). Using about 0.9 amps at 8V and 5.4kHz I could get an LED to light at 2.6V. There seemed to be a voltage peak at that frequency with this arrangement. The primary had an audible whine, which isn’t too surprising. Now the trick is to figure out the most suitable combination of coil geometries, drive frequency, drive voltage, and core type to get the power I need.

For my Living Art final project I’m continuing my blue flower. It will be housed in an acrylic vase that is a wireless inductive power source. If the flower is removed from the vase and its nourishing electric field, the flower will droop and dim.

Concept sketches — results of a marathon single sitting SketchUp session.

Flyby video, 1.5MB DivX 5
Flyby video, 3MB Indeo
SketchUp source file

Front view (labelled):

Side view:

Rear view (labelled):

Pseudo-isometric view:

Continuing in my direction of creating electronic systems which are in some way based upon the principles of nature, I would like to create a system where electronic flowers and electronic beetles interact in a symbiotic relationship.

A number of electronic flowers will be spread around a small “arena”. Each flower will have LEDs to attract the beetles and metallic stamen to provide electricity which “feeds” the beetles. The LEDs will pulse in a pattern which indicates the “genetic heritage” of the flower. As a flower is visited by a beetle the genes of the flower will be modified according to a genetic code carried by the beetle. When a beetle visits a flower it picks up the genetic code of that flower and can bring it to a different flower by visiting it.

The initial set of genes for each flower will be determined randomly and each flower will have a unique set of genes. That’s each flower will have a unique set of pulsing visible in its LEDs. Initially the beetles will not carry any genes — they must pickup a set of genes by visiting a flower.

The beetles will be programmed to look for sequences of flashing LEDs and move in that direction to search for a power source to feed from. Each robot will have a small battery which must your charge by visiting different flowers. One of flower is visited and it will provide a certain amount of power to the beetle and then the flowers power will be temporarily exhausted. If the flower is not visited within a certain amount of time it will “die”.

The expected behavior of the system is that flowers which are difficult to reach or which exhibits LED contraction patterns not favored by the beetles will die. Preferential patterns should begin to spread between the different flowers as they cross pollinate. Beetles which are unable to reach different flowers will also die.

The initial conditions will determine whether a stable system of living beetles and flowers will result or whether the complete system will “die”.

There were some really fantastic pieces presented at the Living Art (generative art combined with physical computing) midterm. Here are the pictures. Kind of hard to tell what’s going on in those unless you’re in the class (video documentation would be better).

For my piece I continued my work with the blue flowers and created a vase for them. They are now powered by a battery which fades over a period of several days. The electronic flowers are inspired by living ones, and die as quickly.

Annotated construction pics from my etched copper blue electronic flowers MKII. Also includes testing pics from Todd’s flourescent fibonacci series.

I completed the second version of my blue flower. This time instead of making a circuit board I etched a copper sheet directly leaving me bare copper circuit traces which could then be bent into shape. Soldering to the copper was difficult because of the large mass of copper sucking the heat away. It was important for me to make a circuit that is it’s own structure. There is an efficiency of design in nature — nothing is wasted and no parts of the structure are without purpose. This flower is an effort to design according to those lines.

The component layout was designed in Eagle and printed out. The petals were then drawn by hand over the component pads, scanned, and cleaned up in Photoshop. The finished layout was laser printed and transferred to copper sheet, which was etched with ferric chloride and cleaned with laquer thinner.

For this week’s Living Art assignment I created two flowers out of circuit boards, wire, resistors and LEDs. Here are the pictures.

I’ve long been interested in creating organic forms and experiences with technology. Creating these flowers is an experiment in trying to create circuits that connect with us based on our heritage as creatures in the real world. In part it’s an effort at technological design in harmony with the natural world and processes.

For some of my inspiration, see Lily Pond by Jeremy Lutes.

I used the “laser printer + clothes iron” circuit board fabrication technique from Thomas Gootee. It works!