art

358 Articles

F.A.T. GOLD San Francisco: May 21-31

April 19, 2015 by 2 Comments

Two of the ideas we keep at our core here at Hackaday: the free and open exchange of information and ideas; and “why” is the wrong question. These concepts are fully in line with the F.A.T. Lab. The Free Art and Technology Lab lives at the intersection of Open Source and Pop Culture and they’re inviting you to jump into the pool of awesome by joining them for the F.A.T. Gold Show in San Francisco May 21-31.

If you’re unfamiliar with the group, take a look at the video after the break and you’ll easily confirm that you need to check this out. We’ve enjoyed the work of F.A.T. Lab members for years now. [Brian] pointed out part of the importance of the “Open” aspect the group in this post on universal connectors for popular toy blocks. We also covered their collaboration on EyeWriter which shows how to build IR eye tracking for the disabled. The group hosts the Graffiti Research Labs (also a collaborator on EyeWriter); we built their Laser Graffiti project as part of a live Hackaday event in January of last year thanks to the open source code they published.

What will you see at this year’s show? The best work the group has to offer from the last eight years plus some debut exhibits. We wish we could be there but we’re planning to be in LA that weekend for the LayerOne conference.

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3D printed motorcycle

3D Printed Motorcycle Weighs Only 18kg

March 24, 2015 by 39 Comments

After discovering 3D printing a few years ago, [Jonathan Brand] was hooked. He loved the ability to design things on a computer, and then have them realized as a real 3D object he can touch — sometimes within hours of doing the CAD work. He’s always wanted a motorcycle, but it was never the right time so at long last he decided to print one.

First off — no, it doesn’t actually work — it’s a 1:1 scale model of a 1972 Honda CB500. But it is an amazing testament to 3D printing and prototyping. He’s been working on it for almost as long as he’s had a 3D printer, and while he didn’t quote exactly how long it took to print everything, we’re guessing its in the thousands of hours.

In fact, he printed tons of components, labeled them, and organized them for up to a year before even being able to assemble them together. Talk about project dedication.

He’s even designed loose fits for moving parts — the wheels spin! To give it the cool transparent look, each part is actually almost completely hollow — with thin wall thickness of only about a millimeter. Because of this, the whole bike only weighs 18kg.

For a slightly more functional large-scale 3D print — how about printing your own colorful kayak?

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Artist Inadvertently Builds Hodoscope

March 6, 2015 by 31 Comments

A Hodoscope is an instrument used to determine the trajectory of charged particles. It’s built out of a three-dimensional matrix of particle detectors – either PIN diodes or Geiger tubes – arranged in such a way that particles can be traced along coincident detectors, revealing their trajectory.

This is not a hodoscope. It’s a chandelier. This chandelier is made of 92 individual Geiger tubes, each connected to a single LED fixture and a speaker. When a charged particle flies through the room and hits a Geiger tube, the light fixture lights up, a ‘click’ plays on the speaker, and the entire room is enveloped in light for a short moment in time. If, however, that charged particle continues on to another Geiger tube, the trajectory of the particle can be deduced.

The purpose of the installation – beside just being art or something – is to show the viewer sources of radiation and normal levels of radioactivity due to terrestrial and cosmic sources. Of course the spacing of these detectors is rather large – it’s made to fit in a gallery – and there is no connection between the detectors, making a coincident circuit impossible. If you want a real hodoscope, here you go.

This installation can be seen at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY through April 12. If you’re in the area, go there and eat a banana. Video below. Thanks [David] for the tip.

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Interactive Sound With Glove And Tape

November 9, 2014 by 14 Comments

Here’s a way to explore new spaces in untraditional manners: a sonophore, or a glove equipped with a tape heads meant to explore spaces with magnetic tape tracing the walls.

This project is a followup to the analogue tape glove from a few years ago. In that project, aligned strips of magnetic tape cover a canvas, leaving anyone wearing the glove to track their hand horizontally swiping across different tracts, or vertically listening to each track.

This project takes a glove similar to the analogue tape glove, but the tape is spread out along the walls of the installation. There’s no way of knowing what strange voices are contained on the tapes; the only way to know is to explore the space.

Video of the project below. It’s a Vimeo, so you know it’s artistic.

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Dottie The Flip Dot Clock

October 24, 2014 by 12 Comments

What is it that we like so much about inefficient, noisy clocks made with inappropriate technology? Answer the question for yourself by watching the video (below) that [David Henshaw] sent us of Dottie, the flip-dot clock.

But besides the piece itself, we really like the progression in the build log, from “how am I going to do this?” to a boxed-up, finished project.

Another stunning aspect of this build is just how nice an acrylic case and a raft of cleverly written software can make a project look. You’d never guess from the front that the back-side was an (incredible) rat’s nest of breadboards and Ethernet wires. Those random switching patterns make you forget all the wiring.

And the servo-steered, solenoid-driven chimes are simply sweet. We’re sure that we’d love to hear them in real life.

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Art From Brainwaves, Antifreeze, And Ferrofluid

October 3, 2014 by 15 Comments

Moscow artist [Dmitry Morozov] makes phenomenal geek-art. (That’s not disrespect — rather the highest praise.) And with Solaris, he’s done it again.

The piece itself looks like something out of a sci-fi or horror movie. Organic black forms coalesce and fade away underneath a glowing pool of green fluid. (Is it antifreeze?) On deeper inspection, the blob is moving in correspondence with a spectator’s brain activity. Cool.

You should definitely check out the videos. We love to watch ferrofluid just on its own — watching it bubble up out of a pool of contrasting toxic-green ooze is icing on the cake. Our only wish is that the camera spent more time on the piece itself.

Two minutes into the first video we get a little peek behind the curtain, and of course it’s done with an Arduino, a couple of motors, and a large permanent magnet. Move the motor around with input from an Epoc brain-activity sensor and you’re done. As with all good art, though, the result is significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

[Dmitry’s] work has been covered many, many times already on Hackaday, but he keeps turning out the gems. We could watch this one for hours.

Ask Hackaday: How Would You Build A Clock Clock?

September 21, 2014 by 96 Comments

Hotel art often elicits less than a glance from most patrons. But we have to admit if we came across a piece like this we’d be compelled to record a video for later reference. That’s actually where the video came from, this was spotted in a hotel called Ham Yard.

The concept seemed familiar to us and a bit of Google-fu brings up our previous coverage of the concept back in 2010. The display is made up of circular analog clocks and we’d wager this is a version of “a million times” by Human Since 1982, the same artist who brought us the earlier concept.

Since we’re covering this once again we thought it would be fun to ask: how would you go about building your own? There are several challenges that come to mind. First, notice both hands of the analog clocks appear to be exactly the same (there is no short hour hand). Driving the coils of a cheap clock directly (a la Lord Vetinari clock hacking) seems an obvious approach. But look closely and you’ll see the hands sometimes move in opposite directions. There must be a simple way to implement the control, or are we chasing a pipe dream of a low cost version for our workshop clock?

[Thanks Munit]