Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: The Art Controller project was originally suggested by our friends (and Maker Faire regulars), San Francisco Bay Area kinetic artists Christopher T. Palmer and Nemo Gould. Amongst other things that they build are amazing mechanical sculptures that need to run for a little while after a visitor presses a button or inserts a coin into the slot.
3 comments:
Say what you will about the DIY "Art" scene, as seen at Maker Faire and fringe festivals around the world, direct technology like this is well worth all the unnecessary fire effects and bad welding you can stomach. I think we are often too divorced from the process of research and development these days, perusing the aisles of industry and searching the catalogs for answers to our problems instead of hammering them out ourselves. In the meantime, we slowly lose both the mental problem solving capacity as well as the physical skill capacity to realize our solutions. If the DIY movement has proven anything, it's that you don't need a Large Hadron Collider or 12 axis CNC mill to complete your project, just an idea and the will to pursue it. Thanks for the controller, CTP.
I have a lot of trouble understanding any sort of electronic systems, but from what I gather, The Art Controller might even be simple enough for me to utilize. What excites me the most about something like this is the huge range of functions it could serve. The number of possibilities for projects that could benefit from something like this is huge.
I think the Design and Production track could benefit from a few circuit-board type lectures in freshman or sophomore year. I also deeply fear what those lecture might entail, since the material is so far from what my brain usually thinks about, but I maintain that it would be good information to have stored away somewhere.
I think this is a really cool idea. Everything about the "Art Controller" seems like a very simple system that even electronic-stupid people such as myself might even understand. I'm sort of surprised this is the only thing out there like it though, and I wonder if it is in fact the first, why there hasn't been anything like it in the past.
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