Elemental Mood Lighting : Just Add Love

We probably shouldn’t have taken on this side project amidst all the pressure to prepare on time for our display at Maker Faire, however I’m glad we have this awesome life relic to show for it!

Since my last update, I took the four complete 3D printed stones and gave their surface a rather sharp makeover. All those years in art school came in handy again. It surprises me just how many techies have never heard of gesso … so I’m tapping this apparent art secret for the sake of painting on an otherwise stubborn surface. ABS will take acrylic paint, however instead of priming it with anything you might get from Home Depot in the paint section… you can go to Blick and grab a pint of clear gesso (canvas primer). It may be a little more expensive, but it’s less volatile, doesn’t have any fumes, and has the best tooth when it dries for painting on… you’ll be thankful you spent the extra money.

So, I gessoed my rocks… and painted them over with a nice solid undercoat of dark muddy brown. The lighter color was dry brushed on top with a healthy amount of baby powder added to the paint to give it a matte, chunky appearance when it dried. The final texture is pretty sharp :

After they were polished up, it was time to get them ready to fulfill their purpose. We ended up using an old revision of the board we designed for our delta robot Kickstarter kit as the brain to drive the LEDs and servos. They have an ATMega 328 on board, so we used the Arduino platform to upload our code onto them (This is Rev A of our delta brain from last year) :

Since there is only one input for a single RGB LED we had to make some Y cables so that all three LEDs could be powered in parallel :

guts splayed out :

Also, the easiest and best way I’ve found to make excellent light diffusers is to go to the Container Store (or some place that has lots of plastic boxes for cheep) and buy something that has a frosted appearance. I found some boxes for under a dollar a piece with perfectly flat lids that I cut triangles into for the tops of these stones :

Here is what the LED tiles inside look like again :

Mark got some basic code on the brains to make them do :

As soon as they were ready we rushed to the living room and set up an altar around the sofa! It was late, but we wanted to test out how they worked as ‘mood lights’. Mark programmed the LEDs to pulse slowly… which was a cool effect because the overall color ambiance of the room would shift slightly as they all faded in and out at random intervals. I am pleased to report they definitely serve their purpose well! Right now each is powered with their own wall wart, but once we switch those out with battery packs they will become permanent fixtures in the living room!

Just add love…

So… I’d call the mood lighting project a success, however like all projects there are some things we learned along the way and would improve if we had to do it all over…

Here is what we’d do better :

Mark and I plan on making the STLs for these available on our website so that anyone can potentially use up an entire role of filament and make their own set of stones too! Before we do that, we want to optimize the design so that they can be printed in fewer pieces giving them a more seamless appearance in the end. The top portion needs to be removable so that the mechanical bits can be installed, so we’ll explore a more aesthetically pleasing way to achieve both in the future.

The wedge pieces are a tad too snug in their slots now that they’re painted. As such, the little servos we used don’t have quite enough torque to push them out like they need to… so we’ll tweak that as well.

The segments of our next revision should lock together somehow, eliminating the need for foam core inside as structural support.

I think other than some minor tweaks in proportion, that’s it. If you do want to print your own, the natural color filament really did work out nicely when painted over. Do keep in mind that we used up an entire role for the first three stones (and we printed on the lowest setting with 10% infill!) >.<

In addition… we want to have the stones active with sensors (instead of an on and off switch) so that they can truly be as theatrical as in the movie. We were thinking of using a collection off different types to detect an approximation of their corresponding element (you know… it would be unwise to set the fire stone on fire and all). We’re open to suggestions! Right now we’re pondering on anything from moisture seniors, photo resistors, pressor sensors, and those nifty magnetic sensors… =D

I think tonight we’ll watch the Fifth Element amidst our new life saving, light-giving stones of glowing awesomeness… I’ve seen the movie 409567209384760587217348 times, but it’ll feel a bit cooler now because I have this sense of ownership that I didn’t before. =]

Thanks for following our project! Show us yours if you decide to make them. We’d love to see improvements to our design!

Back to pooping out delta robots,

-Sarah & Mark

 

Fifth Element Stone Mood Lighting

Now that we’ve ordered all of our bits, pieces, nics, knacks, and parts for Maker Faire… Mark and I are left with a brief lull while we wait for things to show up. Instead of relaxing, we decided to do a ‘weekend’ project to fill the time.  The Sci-fi contest Hackaday is holding right now seemed like the perfect thing to overt our attention to, yet keep us sharp and in our maker headspace. As such… we’ve chosen to make a sic-fi themed prop from my personal favorite sci-fi, The Fifth Element.

This same article can be found on my hackaday.io page for this project here : The Earth Stone

First of all, if you haven’t seen The Fifth Element, all you need to know is that we’re making replicas of these fancy things below which will operate with mechanical and electrical parts instead of spooky earth magic like in the movie =]

Mark and I decided that regardless of what the outer facade was made of, the inside of our stones needed to have a solid but light core which would give them structure and keep a consistent size throughout the four. Foam core will do the trick for this. As such, we modeled the shapes in their final dimensions in CAD and then worked our way inward to determine the measurements for the core.

The foam core bases were kept as one whole piece, scored in the areas where it needed to fold in on itself. Easy enough :

I must note that initially we were going to glue floral foam to the outside of these, carve the markings into them, plaster the surface, and then paint them to look like stone, but lets face it…… we have a 3D printer.

Mark modeled the facade of the stones in CAD. We decided for the sake of printing in safe bursts (in case of fail), it would be smart to break the model into many ring shaped pieces which would stack onto one another. The lower green section is actually six separate smaller pieces :

So far today we were able to complete the ‘Earth’ stone… because it has straight lines carved into it instead of wavy ones and is thus the easiest one to recreate. Mark and I printed six rings for the carved bottom half, and two slightly thicker rings for the solid upper half :

It took the whole day to print all these pieces… but once they were done, I jammed them rather violently onto the foam core centerpiece (tight fit) :

Each ring sits on a small groove/lip of the piece below it, so they lock together like puzzle pieces. The added pressure of the foam core forcing outward keeps them all firmly in place. The final structure is solid and extremely light weight :

Aside from the design on the outside of the stones, we needed to plan for the moving parts at the top. The upper portion has 15mm wide slots in the center of each face. These are the parts that “open” at the end of the movie when the stones activate. We modeled three triangular slices that swing out on some wire as hinges :

These metal wire bits slide into slots Mark made in the wall of the main piece :

The wedges fit in place like so :

These pieces will actuate via servo and wire pushrod. I plan to start on the servo and LED mount tomorrow while the pieces for the next stone are printing :

So yeah… this is our Earth stone so far. Like I said, technical part comes next… and I’ll post an update as soon as I get this one activating and glowing all pretty-like. =]

I think we’re doing ‘water’ next btw. Stay tuned.

Robot Army : Final Stretch

It was fun having our Kickstarter in tandem with the Olympics. It felt like we were participating in our own sort of event. As I watched the closing ceremony last night, I felt sadness because I knew our ship is setting sail soon and I’m at the point where all I can really do is sit tight and wave goodbye. We have less than a week left and I don’t want it to end. It feels like much more could have been done in regard to press, but Mark assures me that PR is sort of like the lottery. If I could accept that I’d stop banging my head over it like I’ve been doing, but alas… it seems I can’t. tehe.

Our campaign has been an exciting experience over all. Now that we’re switching gears from messy uncontrolled busy to just plain busy, I’ll be able to do some of the things I miss in my free time. This includes playing the occasional video game and shooting episodes of Geeky Freaky with Mark. We still have A LOT left to do. Fulfillment is nothing to be taken lightly, but at least I wont have to write articles about myself in third person every morning.

In preparation for the second phase of our Kickstarter, Mark and I set up a forum for communication with our backers… and I’m working on the design layout for our website, robot-army.com. This will be the official hub of our new LLC where our kit will live after it runs its course on Kickstarter, and where everyone can find updates as our project evolves. In addition, this is where our backers can showcase the neat things they do with our kit. I’m secretly hoping to start some weird culture around  exotic modifications done with delta robots (Project Lick would be an example of an exotic use for a delta).

In some other sort of news… Mark and I got a world map from the craft store the other week and decided to visualize where all our backers are located with push pins. Mark is also building us a long white table for his workspace which is now in the process of being transformed into the ‘War Room’. We can finally coral our robots into one area instead of having parts and pieces peppered throughout the house (which they currently are… it looks like a neon yellow boneyard). Any how, the map with all of its pins will go nicely on the wall at the end of the table. Muahahaha…..

We also confirmed that we’ll be showing our installation at the Las Vegas Mini Maker Faire in April. It probably wont be completely ready by then… but we’ll exhibit our progress in some form. Those of you in Vegas can come be the first to see what all the fuss has been about.

If you haven’t told your friends about our Kickstarter, then you might want to urge them to purchase a soldier of the neon yellow onslaught so that it can protect them once the robots start taking over. Just saying… : Robot Army Starter Kit

Robot Army : LAUNCH!

In spite of all of the things that looked like they were going to delay us, we got approved in time for our February 1st deadline and launch at midnight! ON TIME! (WOOOO!!!!)

CHECK IT OUT! : ROBOT ARMY STARTER KIT

Today has been exhausting. We’ve been blasting all of the social channels and so far things are off to a pretty promising start… although Mark and I are both running on empty. We were up until close to 3am last night because we were too excited to sleep. It’s taken everything we’ve got not to just sit and hit the refresh button on our KS page all day long… so we’re getting stuff done at the shop… like set up a nice display in the window.

We plan to make it look like a pet shop window, with graph paper shaving and food bowls filled with scrap electronics… so the little deltas can run their chicken code and charm tourists on Fremont Street. We hung these chintzy xeroxed adoption flyers all over and gave them to our friends to hang up at work.

As I write this we are hanging at 15%…which isn’t a bad start. Hopefully once the weekend is over, we get a mention or two on some tech blogs and things will take off. We’ll see. I really, really hope all my PR pays off. Wish us luck! Better yet… don’t wish us luck- buy a shirt :

We are in the process of getting a bunch of these made; jersey knit with soft ink… vintage style. They’re going to be sharp!

Robot Army : Kinect and Kinematics

All day Tuesday Mark messed with the delta math trying to map the motors to the Kinect input. It seemed like no progress was to be made until the 11th hour when he ran his code and everything suddenly went from fail to working perfectly. So that spooky kinematics hurdle has now been cleared.

Today is turning out to be a bit stressful. I’m preparing to leave for a ten-day winter pilgrimage back east to visit family, and as such am going over a list of things that Mark and I must both take care of over the duration that we are not conjoined at the hip. He’ll be handling all the tangible stuff – while I crunch numbers and go into deep marketing mode.

In other news, we were able to do some actual “light playing” this weekend. As a member of our hackerspace suggested, it would be really neat to see the delta robots paint with their LEDs in some long exposure shots. After another round of promotional pics, we took a robot in the bedroom, set the tripod up and turned out the lights…heh. The result was magical :

I can’t forget to mention that Rev B came in from OSH Park. WOO! If these work, I’ll be ordering another handful this week so that we have enough brains in time for January. With luck, our demo size just doubled from three to six- if not, I have new fancy pasties =]

Interested in making a delta robot? For the full scoop on Light Play, visit : lightplay.zoness.com