ddrysfeöd circuit art sound and light scultpture

Labyrinthian Circuit Sculpture Evokes Moods With Sound And Light

October 20, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 5 Comments

In a famous letter penned by Victorian era author Oscar Wilde, he wrote:

“Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility.”

We can’t help but wonder if [Eirik Brandal] was evoking such Wilde thoughts when he wrote to tell us about ddrysfeöd, an electronic sound and light sculpture which he called “uselessly applied electronics.” Given the mood created by the video below the break, we have to agree that it is indeed quite artful. But if it serves a purpose to inspire and cause wonderment, is it really useless? Let the philosophers philosophize. On to the hack!

[Eirik] was himself inspired by mazes such as those found in children’s activity books and magazines whose goal is to keep a child ~~busy~~ challenged by drawing a solid line from start to finish. With these in mind, [Eirik] constructed ddrysfeöd as an intricate entanglement of electronics, metal, clear and mirrored acrylic, and plated steel, all flung into a three dimensional vortex.

LED’s of red and white oscillate in time with each other. Orchestrating the multimedia symphony is an ESP32, with one core relegated to dealing with the mundane functions of the sculpture while the other waves its electronic wand to keep the ensemble suitably arranged. LED’s are bored into the base, and the acrylic is sanded on the edges to diffuse the supplied light. The electronics run on the usual +5 V, but a +12 V power supply gives volume to the LM380 audio amplifier. We also appreciated that [Eirik] expanded his skills on this project by using Sketchup to plan out the project, even printing the patterns for cutting and drilling the acrylic glass.

If [Eirik]’s build style looks familiar, it may be because you’ve seen it here on Hackaday’s Circuit Sculpture Contest, where some of his work was named Most Beautiful. You can also feast your eyes on a BEAM bot inspired pummer in the shape of a satellite. And remember, if you run across something that presses your buttons, let us know via the Tip Line!

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Several shirts side by side, each with a custom design

3D Print A Custom T-Shirt Design, Step-by-Step

October 15, 2021 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Want to make a t-shirt with a custom design printed on it? It’s possible to use a 3D printer, and Prusa Research have a well-documented blog post and video detailing two different ways to use 3D printing to create colorful t-shirt designs. One method uses a thin 3D print as an iron-on, the other prints directly onto the fabric. It turns out that a very thin PLA print makes a dandy iron-on that can survive a few washes before peeling, but printing flexible filament directly onto the fabric — while more complicated — yields a much more permanent result. Not sure how to turn a graphic into a 3D printable model in the first place? No problem, they cover that as well.

Making an iron-on is fairly straightforward, and the method can be adapted to just about any printer type. One simply secures a sheet of baking paper (better known as parchment paper in North America) to the print bed with some binder clips, then applies glue stick so that the print can adhere. A one- or two-layer thick 3D print will stick to the sheet, which can then be laid print-side down onto a t-shirt and transferred to the fabric by ironing it at maximum temperature. PLA seems to work best for iron-ons, as it preserves details better. The results look good, and the method is fairly simple.

Direct printing to the fabric with flexible filament can yield much better (and more permanent) results, but the process is more involved and requires 3D printing a raised bed adapter for a Prusa printer, and fiddling quite a few print settings. But the results speak for themselves: printed designs look sharp and won’t come loose even after multiple washings. So be certain to have a few old shirts around for practice, because mistakes can’t be undone.

A very thin 3D print makes a decent iron-on that survives a few washes.

A 3D-printed bed adapter enables direct printing onto fabric for better results.

That 3D printers can be used to embed designs directly onto fabric is something many have known for years, but it’s always nice to see a process not just demonstrated as a concept, but documented as a step-by-step workflow. A video demonstration of everything, from turning a graphic into a 3D model to printing on a t-shirt with both methods is all in the short video embedded below, so give it a watch.

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LED Matrix Hourglass Knows Which Way Is Up

October 8, 2021 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

[Fearless Night]’s slick dual hourglass doesn’t just simulate sand with LEDs, it also emulates the effects of gravity on those simulated particles and offers a few different mode options.

The unit uses an Arduino (with ATMEGA328P) and an MPU-6050 accelerometer breakout board to sense orientation and movement, and the rest is just a matter of software. Both the Arduino and the MPU-6050 board are readily available and not particularly expensive, and the LED matrix displays are just 8×8 arrays of red/green LEDs, each driven by a HT16K33 LED controller IC.

The enclosure and stand are both 3D-printed, and a PCB not only mounts the components but also serves as a top cover, with the silkscreen layer of the PCB making for some handy labels. It’s a clever way to make the PCB pull double-duty, which is a technique [Fearless Night] also used on their earlier optical theremin design.

Those looking to make one of their own will find all the design files and source code handily available from the project page. It might not be able to tell time in the classical sense, but seeing the hourglass displays react to the device’s orientation is a really neat effect.

Automate Your Graffiti With The Graffomat!

September 30, 2021 by Jim Heaney 30 Comments

In Banksy’s book, Wall and Piece, there is a very interesting quote; “Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked…”. This sounds like it would be a very exciting city to live in, except for those of us who do not have an artistic bone in their body. Luckily, [Niklas Roy] has come up with the solution to this problem; the Graffomat, a spray can plotter.

The Graffomat is, in its creator’s own words, a “quick and dirty graffiti plotter.” It is constructed primarily from wood and driven by recycled cordless drills that pulls string pulleys to move the gantry. The Arduino Nano at the heart of the Graffomat can be controlled by sending coordinates over serial. This allows for the connection of an SD card reader to drip-feed the machine, or a computer to enable real-time local or over-the-internet control.

We are especially impressed with how [Niklas] handled positional tracking. The cordless drills were certainly not repeatable like a stepper motor, as to allow for open-loop control. Therefore, the position of the gantry and head needed to be actively tracked. To achieve this, the axes are covered with black and white striped encoder strips, that is then read by a pair of phototransistors as the machine moves along. These can then be paired with the homing switches in the top left corner to determine absolute position.

Graffomat is not the first automated graffiti machine we’ve covered. Read here about the robot that painted murals by climbing smokestacks in Estonia.

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A man watching money being shredded in a picture frame

Banksy-Like Stock Tracker Shreds Your Money When The Market’s Down

September 20, 2021 by Robin Kearey 14 Comments

For anyone playing the stock market, and perhaps even more so for those investing in cryptocurrencies, watching the value of your portfolio go up and down can be a stressful experience. If you’d like to have a real-time display of your investments that adds even more stress, [Luis Marx] has got you covered. His latest project is a plexiglass case (video in German) that fills up with banknotes when your portfolio is up, and shreds those same notes when it’s down.

Inspired by an infamous Banksy artwork, [Luis] began by building a wood-and-plexiglass display case suitable for hanging on the wall in his office. He then installed a small paper shredder, modified with a servo so that it could be operated by an Arduino. Unable to find an off-the-shelf banknote dispenser, he designed and 3D-printed one, consisting of a spring-loaded tray and a motor-driven wheel.

The project also includes a Raspberry Pi, programmed to fetch market data from online sources and calculate the net profit or loss of [Luis]’s portfolio. The resulting system is a rather disturbing visualization of the ups and downs of the market: having to sweep strips of green paper off your floor adds insult to the pain of losing money.

If you want a less painful way to keep track of your investments, try this Rocketship. For those interested in traditional stock tickers, this ESP32 based one might be more to your liking.

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What’s Cooler Than A 7-Segment Display? A 7200-Segment Display!

September 14, 2021 by Jim Heaney 17 Comments

If you look around your desk right now, odds are you’ll see a 7-segment display or two showing you some vital information like the time or today’s weather. But think of how much information you could see with over 1,100 digits, like with [Chris Combs’] 7200-segment display.

For [Chris], this project started the same way that many of our projects start; finding components that were too good of a deal to pass up on. For just “a song or two plus shipping”, he was the proud owner of two boxes of 18:88 7-segment displays, 500 modules in total. Rather than sitting and using up precious shelf space, [Chris] decided to turn them into something fancy he could hang on the wall.

the 7200 segment display grayscaling to show the time — The IS31FL3733 can produce 8 levels of dimming 8-bit PWM, allowing [Chris] to display in grayscale

The first challenge was trying to somehow get a signal to all of the individual segments. Solutions exist for running a handful of displays in one device, but there are certainly no off-the-shelf solutions for this many. Even the possible 16 addresses of the IS31FL3733 driver IC [Chris] chose for this project were not enough, so he had to get creative. Fearing potential capacitance issues with simply using an i2C multiplexer, he instead opted to run 3 different i2C busses off of a Raspberry Pi 4, to interface with all 48 controllers.

The second challenge was how to actually wire everything up. The finished display comes out to 26 inches across by 20.5 inches tall, much too large for a single PCB. Instead, [Chris] opted to design a series of self-contained panels, each with 6 of the display modules and an IS31FL3733 to drive them. While the multiplexing arrangement did leave space for more segments on each panel, he opted to go for this arrangement as it resulted in a nice, clean, 4:3 aspect ratio for the final display.

The end result was a unique and beautiful piece, which Chris titled “One-to-Many”. He uses it to display imagery and art related to the inevitability of automation, machines replacing humans, and other “nice heartwarming stuff like that”, as he puts it. There’a video after the break, but if you are interested in seeing the display for yourself, it will be on display at the VisArt’s Concourse Gallery in Rockville, MD from September 3 to October 17, 2021. More info on [Chris’s] website.

This isn’t [Chris’s] first adventure in using 7-segment displays in such a unique way, click here to read about the predecessor to this project that we covered last year.

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Vektor Kollektor Inspector

September 13, 2021 by Michael Shaub 3 Comments

With the world opening up again, [Niklas Roy] and [Kati Hyyppä] have been busy making a public and collaborative project. Meet the Vektor Kollektor, a portable drawing machine experience, complete with a chip-tune soundtrack. It’s great to see public art meet the maker community with zero pretension and a whole lot of fun!

The build started with an HP7475A pen plotter from the 80s, one that was DOA (or was fried during initial testing). [Niklas] and [Kati] kept the mechanism but rebuilt the controls allowing for easy integration with an Arduino Nano and to be powered with a motorcycle battery.

The magic seems to be less in the junk-bin build (which is great) and more in the way this team extended the project. Using a joystick with arcade buttons as an input, they carted Vektor Kollektor to public parks and streets where they invited others to make art. The Kollekted drawings are available on a gallery website in a very cool animated form, freely available for download, on t-shirts, 3D prints, and on coffee mugs because, why not?

Some select drawings are even spray-painted on walls using a large plotter, and we really hope [Niklas Roy] and [Kati Hyyppä] share details on that build soon. Of course this comes hot on the heels of the workshop window cyborg we saw from these two hardware artists.

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