I’ve now attached arduino and the breadboard to the metal tubing and they are structurally very sound. I’ve also wired the flood light in so it now works along side the light sensor. The last job to do is to wire in the inner-temp sensor and dangle it over:
Eight LED’s wired to a piece of board all attached to two metal rods (borrowed from a lamp) that point directly down into the orb:
It was always my intention to have live sensor reading from the orb streamed directly online in some way and to accomplish this I’ve used Pachube.This service allows the user to become a member in order to connect and share real time sensor data to anyone in the world. I’ve set up three livefeeds from one light sensor and two temperature sensors (one located inside the orb and the other located outside). Pachube easily collects this data at an update rate of every five seconds and collates the maximum and minimum averages of each feed. As well as this each feed has it’s own graph which collects data over 24 hour periods to view.
To view my live feeds page click HERE
It will take a couple of hours for the graphs to be populated with a great deal of information but it’s all running live from the board sat right in front of me.
I’m also taking interest in Pachube’s ability to alter arduino behaviour by reading other external feeds from around the world…
Here are some updated production images:
Ok so I’ve officially populated the orb with a small patch off moss, freshly watered the thing and now I’ll need to grow the organism until the project is complete and ready to be enabled and let it do its thing:
(Update: 21.55pm)
I’ve also started programming some of the functionality in arduino. If the light sensor is exposed to ambient room light and gives values of 500 and over I have an LED turned off. Should the sensor get covered and read below 500 the LED turns on:
Quick update on arduino progress. I’ve hooked up two light sensors this morning to get used to working with the breadboard to create more complex circuits. Temperature and humidity sensors require exactly the same set up as light sensors so by creating this circuit now I can replace the second light LDR with a temp sensor and it will be good to go:
(The wires will be tidied up come presentaton day)
I’ve collected most of parts I need to make this ‘bio-orb’ as can be seen from the pictures below. I’ve spent much of my time getting to know Arduino by testing out a number of different sensors using a breadboard. I’m now starting to assemble a kind of mini-floodlight that will be positioned an inch or two above the orb entrance and I’m also wrestling with the voltage needs of two halogen UV lamps. Arduino has only 5 volts to play with so I’ve had to work around this with some additional batteries. This will provide artificial light for plants when the light sensor no longer finds natural light:
update @ 12.18am
Have managed to successfully wire up an LDR light sensor to Arduino. Spent the last several hours desperately trying to get arduino to display the sensor output values on screen and here they are refreshing every half second:
The readings that display between 150 -200 are when I cover the light sensor with my hands. When I take them away and expose the sensor to the light in my room, the readings bolt up to the 600’s. Even knocking some of the light exposure away from the sensor pushes the reading down to the 300’s/400’s.
i-DAT based artist Guto Nobrega’s piece ‘Breathing’ is currently providing a great source of inspiration for my project. Guto has created an organic/technological creature that reacts through movement and light when the organic object (in this case a plant) is breathed on. The robotic part comes to life through the interaction of breath:
It uses a number of sensors attached to separate leafs through an arduino board that picks up breath. This then activates motion in a customised umbrella skeleton. This is good evidence that arduino works effectively between the natural and the technological using sensor arrangements that are programmed to measure subtle alterations in environment. As Guto puts it:
“Breathing is a work of art driven by biological impulse. Its beauty is neither found isolated on the plant nor in the robotic system itself.”
http://www.gutonobrega.co.uk/
I’m also interested in the relationship between the natural organism and the robotic one. In particular I want my project to question which of the two holds more importance/influence over the other. Alternatively perhaps perfect balance can be achieved?
I’ve begun the process of building the circuit for the sensors I will use in my project. I’m using an Arduino board for a number of reasons.
I’m going to need to buy a number of sensors for measuring moisture and temperature. These sensors can talk to arduino connected through a breadboard through a number of analogue and digital outputs. By measuring the levels of moisture in the soil of my organic object and the temperature of the surrounding environment I can then programme software to make my project react accordingly to the needs of the lifeform. So if the moisture level in the soil drops below a certain number the arduino board could turn on an irrigation system to provide water. In the same way if the temperature dropped or raised to a certain level the arduino board could then alter the state of the light source through rules programmed through the software.
As this is the first time I’ve used an Arduino board I’ve been working through the generic ‘getting started’ tutorials and managed to not only got a red LED blinking but also get the rate of the blinking controlled by a potentiometer..great stuff:
Now I need to go shopping for the rest of the components needed for the hardware side of my project. I will need to purchase a breadboard to act as a middle ground connection hub between the component sensors and the arduino board. I will also need to purchase the sensors themselves like the moisture sensor below:
My continued project research now takes an odd turn and focuses on the growing of Moss.
I’ve found some useful websites that have great tips on cultivating a type of plant that has over 12,000 differing species.
Anyways, enough Attenborough and more….erm….
‘When putting together a moss garden, start by filling a shallow pot of your choice with rich organic soil. If you decide to incorporate a plant into your moss garden, place it in the center of the pot. A moss garden wouldn’t be a moss garden without live moss, so the next step is to press live moss onto the surface of the soil. Lastly, arrange the woodland treasures you’ve chosen around and top of the moss.’
courtesy of – http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/40935/make_an_indoor_moss_garden_pg2.html?cat=24
I’m going to put less importance in aesthetics and leave the woodland treasures out. By doing this simple exercise I can find out what moss needs to survive and begin to get a picture of what to give technology control of.
The VVVV patch I developed as part of the 4D module will be available to download and use here very soon…
You will need to download VVVV to be able to run the patch and have a webcam installed on your computer.
You can also download the ‘Transforming Social Narrative’ presentation slides here > transforming social narrative
I’ve pretty much finished the final 4D project in VVVV now. Reacting to motion the portrait shaped screen render enlarges a grid of blocks and, depending on how erratic the movement is, shades them red the larger the frame count goes.
Some tests from various places and distances have proved very good. The fourth floor of Babbage during the day proved a little too tricky for the web-cam I’m using but my bedroom window at night (sounds creepy) and across a 20 metre room proved to work really well especially to vehicles at night. I’m hoping that the distance of third floor Portland square wont be too far for the cam and that the human and traffic movement will be frequent enough to create a lot of movement from the screen.
The VVVV patch I’ve programmed for this uses a motion capture node which measures when a new frame is created and the old frame is deleted virtually every second, or at least every time it picks up movement.
This motion capture node is connected half way between the web-cam detection node and the web-cam render window and can be enabled or disabled and then this feeds into a series of nodes that render the block grid and alter its size and colour finally feeding into the block render window.
This allows for a completely real time reaction to live movement as and when it happens. As far as I know there hasn’t been a node developed or VVVV yet that maps the screen area in which the movement occurred. This would have added a gradient effect to the block render however because of the low resolution nature of the green screen the colour block grid is very effective.
I got out of bed at half past two this morning to scribble some inane thoughts that were working through my head with red pen on note paper.
The ultimate aim of the screen movement is to document social behaviour real time and show it to society as it happens. By showing it to the public the aim is to alter their social narrative by making them question their actions. I was thinking about some of the events that the screen could pick up on. More often than not it will be the usual movement of people walking and meeting or cars, vans and buses driving past. But the screen could end up projecting back to the public something more. On a macabre note what if an explosion occured within view of the webcam or a car accident. The screen would explode into life because of this sudden human activity regardless if the outcome is good or bad.
The screens activity is a very primitive technological mirror of a section of society and social movement. Erratic movement particularly when vehicles drive past could represent a simple visually represented anger or protest at the amount of traffic currently on our roads. Either way it’s movement is informed by society in a bid to transform their actions even in the slightest way.
My meeting with Mike this morning proved really helpful and I finally have some clarity for which to start proper research and begin to develop some physical ideas. Keeping the subject of my dissertation in mind my project will look at the relationship between technology and biological organisms put simply. I want to question what kind of relationship this could be by testing out if technology can succesfully regulate a number of small biological systems or if the demands of these systems could end up actually dictating how the technology works itself. I hope to familiarise myself with the arduino board as the hub for a number of sensors that will keep track of temperature and possibly water levels which well then provide feedback to a computer that will try and regulate some kind of suitable living condition.
Algae, Moss and yeast are a number of examples of the small biological systems I could work with, and I would also need to develop a front end to view probably using Processing or flash. I’ve been pointed in the direction of some interesting examples of some current BioArt that I’ll look into and blog later today to get my bearings including the i-500 project and Symbiotica.
I’ve been tinkering around with VVVV more and discovered a way of rendering a webcam feed. This should eliminate the need to use Flash altogether as the feed can now directly alter the external block render that will be on the screen:
My original plan was to host a live feed using flash and get it talking to VVVV but this is a mucm better way as the VVVV feed has a number of nodes that should be able to directly effect the screen visualisation. Now I need to look into getting the webcam temporarily installed in Portland Square to record social movement and get it talking with the computer that outputs screen things.
