Thursday, September 24, 2009

Sundrop Jewelry


While researching creative jewelry making techniques I came across an interesting process that I thought might be of interest. This guy is harnessing solar power in the most simple way, with a very large magnifying glass. Focusing the heat of the sun rays through the magnifying lens he is able to melt glass and create elegant droplet forms.

I'm mostly interested in the spectacle of the process, and where he found the huge magnifying glass.



Saturday, September 19, 2009

Homework Assignment 1

For the first homework assignment we were asked to create a "lamp" using Arduino and make it unique either by creating an interesting color/blinking pattern with LED lights or by creating an interesting lamp shade, or both. This being my first time working with the arduino board I was a little intimidated by the amount of small pieces and wires provided in the kit. Shortly after unpacking the box I got an LED to blink and had a very large smile on my face. The arduino was easy to use and understand. I was quite satisfied with my accomplishment.

In this first video I attempted to light three planes of a square trapezohedron each with a different color. Unfortunately the light did not diffuse very well. The shade is made of tyvek.

To help the light diffuse a bit I shoved some toilet paper into the shade. The problem this time is the strength of the LEDs. For some reason the green is shining much brighter than the blue and red. I'm not surprised that the red is the dullest because I used in my first tutorial where of course I stuck the light into my breadboard before adding a resistor.
There is more going on than you can see here... Better images to come.