Wind Powered & Amplified Record Player
9/1/08
This project started almost a year ago (and has lasted that long because I get distracted easily…and I generally enjoy a slower pace of things). Originally I wanted to make a record player where the record turned by the wind. I was thinking of having a sort of Savonius layout for the wind collectors originally and putting a centrifical clutch to regulate the speed of the record at 33.33 rpms if it went above that speed. Then I thought it’d be way more interesting to hear the record however the wind felt like playing it, at whatever speed, and in whichever direction. Now that that was settled I began to play with the amplification. I thought about a small solar array for powering speakers and the small amplifier, or just have it powered by the wind too. Finally, I decided on a passively amplified speaker setup, similar to old gramophones with resonators. The grooves of the records are actual transcriptions of the music, there are small bumps within the grooves that are both vertically and horizontally (one for the left channel and one for the right giving you stereo sound!). Using a needle to track the groove will vibrate the needle at the frequencies of the music (bumps) to recreate the music. If you attach the needle to another medium that vibrates, and couple them well to minimize dampening of either high or low frequencies (either by a too rigid or too flexible medium respectively), you can reproduce the music! A simple example is playing a record with no speakers plugged in, you can hear the music very slightly from the needle tip vibrating. I am just amplifying this by making my own “speakers” and coupling them to the needle most efficiently with a resonator.
The final design choice was to make the wind cups that catch the wind also be the resonators. I decided on 3 wind cups to maximise ability to catch wind at any point in the cycle and because, 3 is a pretty magic number. I chose to put my “speaker” inside each wind cup, and run a needle from each of the wind cups to the record surface. Because the wind cups are the part that rotates, and because my “speakers” are inside my wind cups, my record player had to be fixed and the needles would rotate on the record, opposite of conventional record players. Finally, after finding a beautiful old hard drive with an incredible bearing, I had to mount the rotating wind cups/speaker/needle-assembly on top, and the stationary record on the base-platform. I finished the design probably a month ago, and sketched up all the parts and am currently machining them. The base-platform and all the connecting parts between the base and the rotating bearing assembly on top is done and its looking pretty. I’ve gone through 5 or 6 speakers and found 1 design that works pretty good. I’ve been grinding down bicycle spokes to a sharp needle for my record needle and its working well, altho destroying the record pretty badly (old records that worked off of this natural amplification were made of a heavier plastic and the needles were thicker preventing this large-order scratching altogether, things nowadays are precise and fragile). The record will be played at 3 different points, either delayed on the same groove or 3 different parts of the song, or record, altogether. Additionally, I’m looking forward to the crazy Doppler effect that will happen as the wind cups/resonators circle around toward and away from you. Pictures of the assembly and progress will come soon. For now enjoy a sketch from a month ago of the basics now:
9/5/08: Update: Here are the latest pictures of the top, connecting assembly, and base. Also pictures of some speaker prototypes.
9/16/08: Update: Here is a movie of the first rotation & sound!!
The Unseen Mapping Throwies
9/1/08
This project was inspired by a lot of different areas. One of my largest interests is the natural world and restoring our connection with it. I think people can only truly learn an appreciation/connection to something if they experience it for themselves first hand. And only once this happens can they have a personal investment or take interest in it. I think this is a large problem facing our world today, in relation to the environment. In urban settings we do not have the immediate access to the large “open”, “natural” worlds that you see in Outdoor magazine…or so we think. I want to explore “urban nature” and give people easy access to tools to explore these environments in hopes of nurturing this connection and the realization that our urban natures are no different from the natures seen in federal state parks. This is the driving inspiration for my obession with mapping!
One such mapping I want to do is a project mapping environmentally unseeable things, such as temperature, sounds, wind speeds, chemical makeup, etc. I want to create small sensors that can be easily made and are modular that people can deploy on building faces (hang out of windows, or throw onto surfaces using a puddy-ish adhesive on the sensor) or on flat grounds, streets, houses, hanging off bridges, wherever! These sensors will wirelessly communicate with a computer which has a webcam attached. You sight your sensors with the webcam and locate them on your computer screen with a small script I’ve written, then the sensors communicate the data back to your computer. Using a program I’ve written, this data gets interpolated and gets relayed to a projector hooked up to your computer. A filled out colorful contour map is then projected over the sensors so that instead of a sparse matrix, you have an interpolated dense matrix, letting you visualize whatever your sensors sense! Imagine being able to see the flow around a building just by hanging a strand of these out the window, or being able to visually see from above where the ground might be hottest, indicating any number of things, or where pollutants are in a field, or where a city is noisiest! You can finally tell your neighbors with confidence that they are the noisiest neighbors in the entire city!
So far I have the basic design done and code to track the sensors, code to interpolate the data, and basic circuit schematics down. Now I’ve got to work on a big user interface for all these to fit into, figure out wireless communication (wired for version 1.0), and get the projector output geometry correct to match the sensor layout visually.
I am excited. Here’s the original sketch of the idea:
See-Through Surfboard
9/1/08
Imagine surfing and being able to see below you, like a diving mask, and imagine watching someone surf, apparently just floating over water. I want to do that! So, I’m going to build a completely transparent surfboard made out of polycarbonate (think a Nalgene bottle, but not tinted dark)! How am I going to do this? Probably not easily. I tried this about 2 years ago, half-assed, but I started to try. I’ve decided on thermoforming to shape the polycarbonate. Thermoforming is what it sounds like: heat up a plastic until it gets to its more plastic state, and then form it over your mold. I want to specifically use vacuum thermoforming, where you heat the plastic up, then using a vacuum, form your polycarbonate over your mold so that it conforms even more true to the mold due to the pressure gradient. This is going to take a large thermoforming bed and a lot of sucking. Yes, lots of sucking. The bed will have to be 7′x3′ approximately, and more sucking power than you can dream up, actually only a few shop-vacs. So, I’m drawing up plans now for the vacuum-thermoforming bed and getting parts together. I plan on having a top and bottom mold and mating them w/ some sort of plastic adhesive that should basically “weld” the plastic. Maybe I can get a hold of an ultrasonic plastic welder. That would be out of this world fun. More to come soon…