feathering life

working on a patching station for the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute (826 Boston). they had an old array of 1/4″ headphone jacks (25×2) that was just a display piece in the big audio station. daniel and i talked about riggin it up as a place kids could plug in headphones and hear all kinds of different bigfoot sighting reports, random noises of bigfoot, forests, snow, everything furry. i guess there’s a couple ways of doing this: a) having 50 unique audio inputs all looping to the different headphone jacks or b) detecting when a headphone is plugged into one of the jacks, having them all wired to the same audio source, and randomizing the audio source and starting it at a random time so the person feels like they patched into a random feed. i went w/ method b. this also creates confusion which is great, if the person plugs into the same jack twice, they probably will not hear the same track which is great. imagine hearing something amazing, telling your friend to plug into the headphone jack, then having it be something completely different! either the friend is going to think your crazy, or they will assign awesomeness to something that might not be that rad, bringing more awesomeness into the world. how do we detect a headphone being plugged in? turns out a lot of 1/4″ jacks not only have the 3 prongs for the audio feed, but 2 extra that essentially can be used as contact switches to detect a break in continuinty also known as plugging in a headphone. i wired these up in series to an arduino and then used processing to read the serial output from arduino and output audio at appropriate times. it is pretty awesome, its reminds me of an analog sampling setup. if only i could find the short that has recently come up in the maze of hundreds of soldering points…..

wanted to build something the other night at miters, but nothing very invovled. i grabbed some blue foam at a construction site that was laying around, used a nichrome heating wire and a variable ac power supply, cut out an airfoil from a piece of wood, and hot-wire cut 2 symmetrical wings which went well after help from someone else. it turns out when cutting a wing with non-constant chord, it helps to have someone moving the wire on the other end of the wing. i was movingn one end of nichrome along root, he moved along the tip and we would try and move teh wire to 25% chord @ same time, then 50%, 75% and finally reach end of chord at same time to make correctly shaped wings. the wings turned out nice, i fixed them together and added a tail for stability/cg. theoretically, flying wings are hyper stable, wing sweep is almost equivalent to dihedral in terms of roll stability. it is a little trickier placing the cg correctly as opposed to placing it to a non-swept wing (~1/4 chord-ish usually). it turns out my airfoil was too agressive/sharp on the bottom leading edge so as soon as the plane started gaining speed, a large vortex would be tripped off the bottom leading edge causing a huge downwad pitching moment (low pressure) and the plane would just nose dive. after realizing this, i sanded the bejesus out of the leading edge and got it flying really beautifully. eventually i donated it to my neighbors kid who quickly threw it as hard as possible straight into the ground. i should at least get some design/materials points for it not breaking right?

whats better than rain raining? hint: its not men…nor women

more to come soon……

black was boring the hell out of me, so i stripped the paint off! after hours of angle grinding/steel wool/and a fresh clear coat, baldamort is bare metal and ready to shred.

here is the first video of the record player turning and making music (some would argue noise)! finished up the base and towering bearing arm, and quickly slapped together a temporary arm and speaker to see if it would even play and it did. so now i have a whole new set of challenges in terms of making it sound less scratchy, having the needle track the grooves (right now its on a fixed circle, i.e. not moving), and also moulding the resonators/wind catchers. click the picture below to watch the movie