Phunny Phone Phaces

Phaces in strange Places! This I noticed kept coming up for me from time to time this term. Half the time I would just pull out my phone and not even realize that I was taking sometime an ordinary object and tweaking what it was with these quick shots. Some were taken more recently when I knew that I wanted to do this idea for my presentation make up grade, and others were taken earlier, but it is very interesting how many times these thing would be overlooked if not looking for something of the sort.

Enjoy!



A couple goggly clock images. It really adds a very personality defining aspect to the time of day in the house. Mustache time???


This is just an image that I managed to capture while driving down I-5, look close and you can make out the creepy face in the plume, kinda cool!


^----Lamp Nose? Shower Nose? ----v



^ Stare deep, deeeep into my sockets! v


^^^^Truly Electrifying!^^^^

Hheh, I just can't get enough of these two guys! Gets me every time :P


You got something on your lip man!

Fin! (Phin?)

Dazzling Disko Dance!

Well it looks like project 2 has come and gone. I really wish i was better at keeping up with this blog-O-sphere thing better, but an overview of the process is better the nothing I suppose. I did manage to take a bit bette documentation for this project and even have final images!

The basic idea behind my work was to explore the potential with LEDs, what I can do and how I can work with them. I chose an eight by eight matrix for the base of my light show because I had the chip to controll such a matrix and I also wantedto expand on this idea that I had worked on a bit previously.

I will start by showing you the finished product:


The matrix is situated in 7 rows of 8 with the final row of 8 located on the bottom of the container. My first version of this matrix was very plane and situated in a square 8x8 layout. I am much happier with this second outcome because the vessel that this display is shown in allows for a more interesting show.




Above you can see the original tube that I purchased for the low low price of $5 at Bring. I then cut it down to just around a foot long and created a grid pattern based on it's circumference to mark out the ares to drill for my LEDs.

I then went about wiring the matrix up, where I would have to connect all the anodes in a line together and then all the cathodes crossing in the other direction to make the matrix. As seen below I used the container to set up the wiring on the outside then i flipped it inside out and put the LEDs through the inside. Then I painted the outside white to give it a bit more neutral color and a start off place if I decided that a certain color scheme was better for the location that this piece settle down in.




Next we can see the finished LED matrix with the bottom cap attached in the background. After that we have two images of setting up the wiring into the container and then with my arduino.





The beauty of this light show is that I can program the lights to do just about what ever i want them to do. There is plenty of customization possible and I plan to keep tweaking this thing in the days to come. If I could change some aspects of this I would have used RGB LEDs, and included a mic with a band pass filter screening for lows and highs and change the speed based off of this. I had a lot of fun with this over all and am very happy with tis new version of the light show. I plan on continuing interesting ways to recreate this idea.

***On an extra note, if there was a tool that I could say was my wing man for the use of LEDs; that tool would be a wire wrap tool. If you have never used a wire wrap tool before and you do a bunch of wiring, soldering and the like for prototypes and other quick little projects that you may not actually need to solder, I would highly recommend you get one of these. A quick break down n how they work is you have the tool that looks like a small jewelers screw driver. You load it with this really thing wire that is the wire wrap material. Then you insert the leg of a LED, for instance, twist clockwise till all the wire you need is around the leg of the LED and BLAM! you have a tightly warped wire around your led in well under half the time it would take to even do a quick solder! This may not bee the best connection so for some more permanent jobs that you want yo last you should still use solder, but this tool saved me over 3 hours of wiring time!

Almost there!

Well I haven't posted on my progress in quite a while so here we go for a big update!

I am just about finished with the base version of my project. All that is left is to finish glueing the wheels onto the last two panels and installing them. Sadly i would even be done with that part if i wasn't stuck at work right now :( Any how, this has been an interesting project filled with many ups and downs, but it's nice to finally see it coming together.

A quick overview of the project is: modifying my house's current food storage cabinet to be dog proof, while making it more personalized for each roommates shelf. The personalization comes with using a piece of acrylic with a laser etched image of the roommate on it as a door for their shelf.

One of the first steps after the initial planing was to take the pictures of each roommate to get ready for the laser cutter. After I had the pictures I took them into illustrator and used the live trace function to get a stylized black and white image. The black parts are what was etched out and the white was left. This gave the resulting acrylic personalized doors.





After my imaged were etched into the acrylic it was time to take a trip to the Home Depot (which turned out to be many many trips). At home depot I picked up 4 sets of drawer casters and some assorted screws and bolts. Because i was modifying the existing cabinet figuring out a way to attach the wheels from on half of the drawer casters to the acrylic proved difficult, as well as attaching the other half of the drawer casters to the cabinet. the solution I came up with was a little less professional then I had hoped, but the best I could figure out: Super glue! Lots of super glue! Below is a picture of the casters in place on the cabinet and also a close up of the wheels glued to the acrylic.






After much ghetto gluing I was able to finish tow of the four doors. Now all that remains is to finish the other two doors and attach them. the way they work is by lifting up on the bottom and swinging them up then pushing in along the railing. Now moose can't eat out food! Below is an image of the two doors that are finished.



Once I finish the practical application I have plans to set up led's for each panel which are connected to an arduino attached to an ambient light sensor. When the light level is high enough the leds will be turned off and when the light level is low enough the leds will be turned on, thus making the panels light up then the kitchen is dark!

It has been a long process so far, but I am looking forward to seeing the finished product!

Some design ideas to solve my problems!

Here are a few different design ideas that I am thinking about for my anti-moose (our house dog) storage device.

This idea is a parody of the food pyramid where each storage spot is one of the different food group zones.

This one takes the idea of traditional wood carved story boards to tell the tale (tail) of the new food storage unit.

Here we have a very basic design for storage, but each door panel has the face of the owner cut into it.

Here is a funny take on storage where Moose is the actual shelf and he is reaching up to get all the food! How like that little devil!

The problem

Well I had narrowed down my problem/problems to wanting to build something, to use my hands and make something useful for around the house. The main issue with this idea was that I had no clue what I wanted to make! I was torn between something functional with a real purpose for my house, or something neat that was pleasing to look at or interact with. Of course I could make something that covered both of these areas, but i still didn't have any idea what that thing might be.

Well following off of the problem method, I decided that my new problem was not know what to make with my hand. Fortunately all of my problems were solved with the not so long lasting mystery of the bread bandit! Who was stealing all of the beard? Where had it gone to? Some strange land of lost bread? No that can be, that's just crazy! But maybe all the mold comes from this strange land???

Nope! Turns out the culprit is none other then Moose the dog :(

Yes i know, he may look harmless right now, but if you were a loaf of bread you wouldn't last a second against this monster!

With my problem solved I now needed a solution. How am I to design something to keep this "little" guy off of the food racks and the bread out of his belly? Well that's the problem that I'm probably going to tackle, but at this moment I'm not 100% what i will add to our set up to make it more moose proof, and I don't know how i'll manage to work out using the laser cutter, but these are all things i plan on figuring out in the very near future!

That's all for now, more craziness later!

(repeated from class blog because I screwed up)

Mind mapTastic!

Here is a quick look at some of my "connections."

Enjoy!

First!

OMG, first post! WOW!

MOAR to come!