This last month we had three workshops:
First of all Processing and how to connect it to Twitter or other RSS feeds. Then we enjoyed the silkscreen introduction by Zwax and talked about a concept to create interactive shoes.
But in this post I actually want to tell about my experiences with building the animation bike “vagina dentata” at metalab and show you the different steps of producing it.
1) I got an old bike (BMX) from the dusty basement and with took it apart, in order to be able to foot pedals to make a wheel spin.
2) Then I took off the plastic wheel from the metall structure and painted it white.
3) Next I was drawing rectangular shapes and round shapes in a vector graphics program. I sent those two vector graphics to Metalab Lasor Cutter, which cut a number of them out of acryl plastic. Both shapes had little holes and teeth so I could fit them together easily by adding some glue from a glue gun. Each rectangular shape got connected with a round shape, building each one frame of my animation.
4) I glued the frames to the wheel
5) From a infrared LED and a infrared light receiver diode I created a very simple distance sensor. The infrared light sends out it’s brightness and if there is any object in front of it, it’s reflection of light will be captured by the receiver diode, which “knows” now, that there is an object, rather than nothing.
6) I connected this self made sensor with a 12 Volt power supply. With the help of Bernhard from Metalab I created a mosfat circuit, that triggered an LED everytime my distance sensor tracked an object.
7) To make this circuit sustainable we printed it on a board.
8 ) I painted one image for each frame of the animation on the acrylic pieces I had cut with the laser cutter.
9) I mounted the sensor on the bike, so it would track if there is a frame in front of the LED or no frame, a kind of “shutter”.
10) With reflection tape I adjusted the timing between ligth/no light
11) Now if you use the pedals you spin the wheel, the light on the bike goes on and off, projecting the image on each frame to the wall behind it
12) Voila: here you have your home made animation
I want to thank Bernhard for sharing his skills and time as well as parts of his equipment for this project!
You can check out this project and test it yourself at GAZEBO in front of Werkzeug h