Cute Brass Lunar Lander is a Neat Little Environment Monitor https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/cute-brass-lunar-lander-is-a-neat-little-environment-monitor/ #environmentalmonitor #Microcontrollers #CircuitSculpture #nRF52840 #Art
#circuitsculpture
I've only contributed a handful of #ArtAdventCalendar examples for my debut year on Mastodon.
To close out here's a circuit sculpture, titled "Astable Exhalation", I made in 2020 and placed in my window as a lockdown #Christmas decoration. Here's hoping everyone's festive holidays this year are far less isolating than they were two years ago.
Project page
https://hackaday.io/project/175570-astable-exhalation
Dedicated to all those who are spending Christmas alone this year #JoinIn
#CircuitSculpture #electronics
Kaleidoscope – Feelings Turned Into LED Tree
In 2020, [Eddie] found himself with a few hundred RGB LEDs left after a pandemic-interrupted project, and a slew of emotions he wanted to express - so he turned to the language of hardware, and started sculpting his feelings into an art project. He set out to build an LED tree around a piece of wood he picked for its cool shape, and trying out a long-shelved idea of his, while at it - using different resistors to mix colors of the RGB LEDs. The end result, pictured above, has earned "The Most Important Device" spot in our recent Sci-Fi contest, fair and square.
Initially, he wanted to use ATTiny microcontrollers and PWM all the lights in parallel. Having built an intermediate prototype, a small LED flower, he scrapped the idea due to technical problems, and then simplified it by hard-wiring RGB LEDs with randomly selected colors instead. As for the glowing orbs themselves, he made these just by pouring hot glue into silicon orb molds, a simple technique any of us could repeat. After 90 hours of work between him and an assistant he hired, the LEDs were wired up, each with random resistors connected to green and blue LED colors, and some warm white LEDs added into the mix.
He wanted to mostly use blue and green colors, as symbols of a world revived and revitalized - something we can't help but keep our fingers crossed for. Before putting it all together, they wouldn't know which colors each of the LEDs would power up in - part of the charm for this art piece, and no doubt a pleasant surprise. In the end, it turned out to be a futuristic decoration that we're glad a camera could capture properly! If you like what you see, the build logs linked above have a bit more insights into how it all came together.
LED-adorned plants are fun projects that bring joy for a long time after you've finished them. You can easily make a LED tree out of what you have on hand, and if you get real fancy, you can create an intricate bonsai, too. And, if you're ever interested to experiment with castellations, you can design yourself some PCB cube flowers!
This project was an entry into the 2022 Sci-Fi Contest.Check out all of the winning entries here.
#art #ledhacks #2022scificontest #circuitsculpture #led #ledtree #rgb #tree
Sound and Light Play off Acrylic and Wire in This Engaging Circuit Sculpture
It's no secret that we really like circuit sculptures around here, and we never tire of seeing what creative ways people come up with to celebrate the components used to make a project, rather than locking them away in an enclosure. And a circuit sculpture that incorporates sound and light in its design is always a real treat to discover.
Called "cwymriad" by its designer, [Eirik Brandal], this sound sculpture incorporates all kinds of beautiful elements. The framework is made from thick pieces of acrylic, set at interesting angles to each other and in contrasting colors. The sound-generating circuit, which uses square wave outputs from an ESP32 to provide carrier and modulation signals for a dual ring modulator, is built on a framework of tinned wires. The sounds the sculpture makes have a lovely resonance to them, like random bells and chimes that fade and mix together. There's also a matrix of white LEDs that form a sort of digital oscilloscope that displays shifting waveforms in time with the music.
While we like the way this looks and sounds, the real bonus here is the details of construction in the video below. [Eirik]'s careful craftsmanship working with multiple materials is evident throughout; we were especially impressed by the work needed to drill holes for the LED matrix, any one of which slightly out of place would have been painfully obvious in the finished product.
This is far from [Eirik]'s first appearance on these pages. His vacuum tube and silicon "ioalieia" was featured just a few weeks back, and "ddrysfeöd" used the acrylic parts as light pipes in a lovely way.
#art #acrylic #circuitsculpture #echo #esp32 #led #ringmodulator #synthesizer
Remoticon 2021 // Debra Ansell Connects PCB in Ways You Didn’t Expect
"LEDs improve everything." Words to live by. Most everything that Debra Ansell of [GeekMomProjects] makes is bright, bold, and blinky. But if you're looking for a simple string of WS2812s, you're barking up the wrong tree. In the last few years, Debra has been making larger and more complicated assemblies, and that has meant diving into the mechanical design of modular PCBs. In the process Debra has come up with some great techniques that you'll be able to use in your own builds, which she shared with us in a presentation during the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon.
She starts off with a quick overview of the state of play in PCB art, specifically of the style that she's into these days: three dimensional constructions where the physical PCB itself is a sculptural element of the project. She's crossing that with the popular triangle-style wall hanging sculpture, and her own fascination with "inner glow" -- side-illuminated acrylic diffusers. Then she starts taking us down the path of creating her own wall art in detail, and this is where you need to listen up.
For instance, getting a PCB made with white soldermask -- perhaps because you like its reflective qualities -- is more expensive than standard green or even black. Debra's hack? Silkscreen is free. Solid white silk over a black mask looks just like a white PCB to us! She breaks down the retail prices of her materials for us, comparing PCB with acrylic. PCBs end up being about 50% more expensive per square cm than raw acrylic stock, but unless cutting and shaping that acrylic is free, it's probably a wash. Plus if you have any electronics that needs mounting, you might as well just go with the PCB.
The heart of this talk, though, is about something that's not so high-tech, but is make-or-break for any project that involves multiple working parts: connectors. (Check out her take on why looking for the right connector is like online dating!) After working through all the design trade-offs, she comes up with her own.
Spoiler alert: the custom PCBs are connected together with more custom PCBs! The sandwich of acrylic standoffs, pressure connectors, and PCB material ticks all the boxes: mechanical stability, budget friendliness, and good looks.
Debra closes out with an overview of her more recent work. You'll learn why not to use dollhouse hinges as connectors on a wearable bracelet, the pros and cons of soldering PCBs together versus using custom connectors, how to make a snake out of boards connected by custom slip rings, and even see a brand new design: her Light Tiles 2.0. If you're not inspired to make something blink, or to make a modular construction from multiple PCBs, we don't know what it'll take!
Debra has also posted up the talk's slides if you want to follow along at home.
#hackadaycolumns #ledhacks #parts #wearablehacks #circuitsculpture #connectors #pcbart #pcbdesign
The Eerie Sounds Of Ioalieia: An ESP32/Valve/Analog Hybrid Circuit Sculpture
Tidy straight lines. Nice job!
We've not had a circuit sculpture piece for a while, so here's "ioalieia" a lovely hybrid digital-analog sound sculpture by [Eirik Brandal] to dig into. The host of the show is the ESP32 module, which generates audio frequency square waves, which are fed into a MCP4251 digital potentiometer. From there, it is fed into a AS3320 Voltage controlled filter (VCF), from Latvia-based ALFA (which is new to us, despite them being manufacturing electronics for sixty years!) This is an interesting device that has a four independently configurable filter elements with voltage controlled inputs for frequency control and resonance. The output from the VCF is then fed into a 6n2p (Soviet equivalent to the 12ax7) twin-triode vacuum tube, which is specifically aimed at audio applications.
The suitably distorted filtered square waves then pass into a Princeton Tech Corp PT2399 echo processor cjip, which being digitally constructed, uses the expected ADC/RAM/DAC signal chain to implement an audio echo effect. As with the VCF, the echo depth can be modulated via the digipot, under the ESP32's command. For a bit of added bling, the vacuum tube output feeds back into the ESP32, to be consumed by the internal ADC and turned into a light show via some PWM controlled LEDs. Lovely.
The final audio output from the echo chip is then fed into a speaker via a pair of LM380 amplifiers giving a power of about 5W. It sounds pretty good if you ask us, and software configurable via Wi-Fi, giving this sculpture plenty of tweakabilty.
Of course circuit sculpture come in all shapes and sizes, and it wouldn't do to not mention at least one sculpture clock project, and while we're on it, here's last year's remoticon circuit sculpture workshop.
#art #musicalhacks #analog #as3320 #circuitsculpture #digital #digitalecho #esp32 #mcp4251 #pt2399 #vacuumtube
“Buggy” Circuit Sculpture Based on a Tuning Indicator Tube
If you've ever used an old tube radio, you might be familiar with that mysterious little green display that helps you to tune exactly to a station. That display is called a tuning indicator, or magic eye tube; in essence it's a minimalistic cathode ray tube that can sweep its electron beam along only one axis. It thereby outputs a kind of bar graph that varies with the input voltage.
With few modern uses other than being pretty, it only makes sense that these tubes find their way into works of art: [Patrice] used one to make an insect-like piece of circuit sculpture. The tube he used is an EM34, which is one of the most common indicator tubes around and has a circular, iris-like display area. This becomes a large eye, peering forward from the bug's body. The legs are made from 1.5 mm thick brass wire, while a DC/DC converter generates the 210 Volts DC needed to operate the tube.
An interesting "touch" is the addition of two antennae that are hooked up in such a way that the tube's image changes when you push them; this interactivity makes the bug come alive a little bit. Speaking of touch, we think it would be prudent to put some insulation around the 210 V wires; even though the bug is battery-powered, touching the high voltage and ground wires simultaneously would deliver a nasty shock.
Nevertheless, the bare-wire retro design looks beautiful and would make a great ornament for any electronics-lover's office. We've seen magic eye tubes being used for various purposes: you can turn them into a spectrum analyzer, measure capacitors with them, or simply use them as a bar-graph display.
Light-Tracking BEAM Robot Can See The Light
BEAM robotics, which stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics, is an ethos that focuses on building robots with simple analog circuits. [NanoRobotGeek] built a great example of the form, creating a light-tracking robot that uses no batteries and no microcontrollers.
The robot aims to track the brightest source of light it can see. This is achieved by feeding signals from four photodiodes into some analog logic, which then spits out voltages to the two motors that aim the robot, guiding it towards the light. There's also a sound-detection circuit, which prompts the robot to wiggle when it detects a whistle via an attached microphone.
The entire circuitry is free-formed using brass wire, and the result is an incredibly artful build. Displayed in a bell jar, the build looks like some delicate artifact blending the past and future. Neither steampunk nor cyberpunk, it draws from both with its combination of vintage brass and modern LEDs.
It's a great build that reminds us of some of the great circuit sculptures we've seen lately. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Adrian for the tip!]
#art #robotshacks #beam #beamrobotics #circuitsculpture #lightsensor
Circuit Sculpture Lamp is a Colorful Cube Companion
Circuit sculpture is engineering and art all at play together. One must combine the functional with the aesthetically appealing. [EdwardA61] did just that with this enchanting lamp build.
Like many other circuit sculptures, the build relies on the aesthetic qualities of brass, though [EdwardA61] notes that copper wire can be used as well. Four WS2812B LEDs, in their bare PCB-mount form, are soldered into a circuit using the brass to carry the power and data signals as needed.
A Seeduino Xiao microcontroller is responsible for controlling the show, though relies on a typical PCB rather than a circuit sculpture in and of itself. It does provide for easy powering and programming however, with the benefit of its USB-C connector.
It's a simple skeleton design, as so many circuit sculptures are, but it's a form that we've come to love and appreciate. [EdwardA61] did a great job of photographing the build, too, showing how the colors on each LED interplay with each other as they're cast on the table.
It's a lamp we'd love to build ourselves, and we hope that [EdwardA61] follows through on plans to cast a similar design in clear resin, as well. If you've built your own artistically electrical sculptures, be sure to let us know!
A Breathtaking Circuit Sculpture Clock
Here at Hackaday, we pride ourselves on bringing you the very freshest of hacks. But that doesn't mean we catch all the good stuff the first time around, and occasionally we get a tip on an older project that really should have been covered the first time around. This remarkable circuit sculpture clock is a perfect example of one that almost got away.
[Gislain Benoit] creation is called "The Tower" for good reason: it's built inside what amounts to a giant glass test tube. Inverted and adorned with MDF discs, the Pyrex tube stands 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, and is absolutely stuffed with electronic goodness. There are more than 2,100 discrete components mounted inside on a helical framework of carefully bent wires, forming a vertical sculpture that displays the time on three separate pairs of seven-segment displays. All the diode-transitor logic circuits are built from discrete components; nary a chip was used, and to spice things up, [Gislain] used LEDs in place of regular diodes everywhere in the circuit. The result is a constant light show as the clock goes through its paces.
The whole thing looks amazing, and even the power supply at the base works in the overall presentation. The design is a bit of a departure from [Gislain]'s previous circuit sculpture clock, but it's just as beautiful, and equally as mind-boggling in terms of construction difficulty.
Thanks to [Maarten] for the belated tip on this one.
Labyrinthian Circuit Sculpture Evokes Moods With Sound and Light
In a famous letter penned by Victorian era author Oscar Wilde, he wrote:
_" Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility." _
We can't help but wonder if [Eirik Brandal] was evoking such Wilde thoughts when he wrote to tell us about ddrysfeöd, an electronic sound and light sculpture which he called "uselessly applied electronics." Given the mood created by the video below the break, we have to agree that it is indeed quite artful. But if it serves a purpose to inspire and cause wonderment, is it really useless? Let the philosophers philosophize. On to the hack!
[Eirik] was himself inspired by mazes such as those found in children's activity books and magazines whose goal is to keep a child ~~busy~~ challenged by drawing a solid line from start to finish. With these in mind, [Eirik] constructed ddrysfeöd as an intricate entanglement of electronics, metal, clear and mirrored acrylic, and plated steel, all flung into a three dimensional vortex.
ddrysfeöd is at home evoking moods in the light as well as the dark.
LED's of red and white oscillate in time with each other. Orchestrating the multimedia symphony is an ESP32, with one core relegated to dealing with the mundane functions of the sculpture while the other waves its electronic wand to keep the ensemble suitably arranged. LED's are bored into the base, and the acrylic is sanded on the edges to diffuse the supplied light. The electronics run on the usual +5 V, but a +12 V power supply gives volume to the LM380 audio amplifier. We also appreciated that [Eirik] expanded his skills on this project by using Sketchup to plan out the project, even printing the patterns for cutting and drilling the acrylic glass.
If [Eirik]'s build style looks familiar, it may be because you've seen it here on Hackaday's Circuit Sculpture Contest, where some of his work was named Most Beautiful. You can also feast your eyes on a BEAM bot inspired pummer in the shape of a satellite. And remember, if you run across something that presses your buttons, let us know via the Tip Line!
Kinetic Synth-Kebab Sculpture Plays Punk Sequentially
What's better than an Atari Punk Console synthesizer? How about four Atari Punk Console synthesizers. And what better way to present them but as brass wire art sculptures. We'd have forgiven [iSax] if he'd stopped at four brass wire synths, but he took things to another level with his kinetic sculpture that does double duty as a mechanical sequencer. Called the Cyclotone - The Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer, it features wood, brass, brushes, and 555 timers. You can see the demonstration in the video below the break.
If you're not familiar with the Atari Punk Console, it's a circuit first described as a "Sound Synthesizer" in Forest Mims' "Engineer's Notebook: Integrated Circuit Applications" first published in 1980. It utilized two 555 timers in a single chip, the 556. Later dubbed the "Atari Punk Console", the circuit has stood the test of time and is still quite popular among hackers of all sorts.
[iSax]'s build adds a sequencing element that allows the synths to be played automatically. The synthesizers are skewered 90 degrees from each other on a square dowel, which is turned at a variable RPM by a stepper motor controlled by a knob at the base of the sculpture.
On either side of each synth is a commutator that contacts salvaged rotary tool brushes which provide power through the hexagonal brass supports. Each synth retains its own speaker and controls and has its own segmented numeral displayed with discrete LED's that light up when each synth is played.
We applaud [iSax] for a well executed and imaginative build that successfully meshes circuit scultpure, kinetic sculpture, classic electronics and even blinkenlights. If you enjoyed this build, you should also go have a look at a free form Atari Punk Console build and another one built into a joystick. If you come across a project of any kind that catches your fancy, be sure you let us know about it via the Tip Line!
#digitalaudiohacks #555 #555timer #ataripunkconsole #circuitsculpture #kineticsculpture #mechanicalsynthesizer #synth #synthesizer
Hackaday Links: September 26, 2021
Dealing with breakdowns is certainly nothing new for drivers; plenty of us have had our ride die in mid-flight, and experienced the tense moment when it happens in traffic. But the highly integrated and instrumented nature of the newest generation of electric vehicles can bring an interesting twist to the roadside breakdown, if the after-action report of a Tesla driver is any indication.
While driving on a busy road at night, driver [Pooch] reports that his Tesla Model S started beeping and flashing warnings to get to the side of the road right away. [Pooch] tried to do so, but the car died, coasted to a stop in the middle of the road, and engaged the parking brakes. The bricked Tesla would have been a sitting duck in the middle of the road but for a DOT crew who happened to be nearby and offered to provide some protection while [Pooch] waited for help. The disturbing part was the inability to get the car into any of the service modes that might let it be pushed off to the shoulder rather than stuck in traffic, something that's trivial to do in ICE vehicles, at least older ones.
In other electric vehicle news, Chevy Bolt owners are turning into the pariahs of the parking garage. General Motors is telling Bolt EV and EUV owners that due to the risk of a battery fire, they should park at least 50 feet (15 meters) away from other vehicles, and on the top level of any parking structures. There have been reports of twelve battery fires in Bolts in the US recently, which GM says may be due to a pair of manufacturing defects in the battery packs that sometimes occur together. GM is organizing a recall to replace the modules, but isn't yet confident that the battery supplier won't just be replicating the manufacturing problem. The social distancing rules that GM issued go along with some fairly stringent guidelines for charging the vehicle, including not charging overnight while parked indoors. With winter coming on in the northern hemisphere, that's going to cause a bit of inconvenience and probably more than a few cases of non-compliance that could end in tragedy.
Fans of electronic music might want to check out "Sisters with Transistors", a documentary film about some of the pioneering women of electronic music. Electronic music has been around a lot longer than most of us realize, and the film reaches back to the 1920s with Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore, and continues on into the 1980s with Laurie Spiegel, whose synthesizer work has been speeding away from Earth for the last 44 years on the Golden Records aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Hackaday readers will no doubt recognize some of the other women featured, like Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, who cobbled together the early Dr. Who music with signal generators, tape loops, and random bits of electronics in the pre-synthesizer days of the early 60s. We've watched the trailer for the film and it looks pretty good -- just the kind of documentary we like.
We're big fans of circuit sculpture around here, and desperately wish we had the patience and the skill to make something like Mohit Bhoite or Jiri Praus can make. Luckily, there's now a bit of a shortcut -- Geeek Club's Cyber Punk PCB Construction Kit. These kits are a little like the love child of Lego and PCBWay, with pieces etched and cut from PCB stock. You punch the pieces out, clean up the mouse bites, put Tab A into Slot B, and solder to make the connection permanent. Each kit has some components for the requisite blinkenlight features, which add to the cool designs. Looks like a fun way to get someone started on soldering, or to build your own skills.
And finally, another nail was driven into the coffin of Daylight Savings Time this week, as the island nation of Samoa announced they wouldn't be "springing ahead" as scheduled this weekend. Daylight Savings Time has become a bone of contention around the world lately, and mounting research shows that the twice-yearly clock changes cause more trouble than they may be worth. In Europe, it's due to be banned as soon as all the member nations can agree on normal time or summer time.
In the case of Samoa, DST was put into effect in 2010 on the assumption that it would give plantation workers more productive hours in the field and save energy. Instead, the government found that the time change just gave people an excuse to socialize more, which apparently upset them enough to change the rule. So there you have it -- if you don't like Daylight Savings Time, start partying it up.
#hackadaycolumns #hackadaylinks #battery #bolt #brick #circuitsculpture #daphneoram #daylightsavingstime #deliaderbyshire #electronicmusic #fire #recall #synthesizer #tesla #theremin
A #circuitsculpture that is a functioning Z80 computer.
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