Most Useless Machine: Building Elevator Edition

[Niklas Roy] calls it his Perpetual Energy Wasting Machine, but we know it for what it truly is: a building-sized most useless machine. You’ll remember that a most useless machine is a bobble that uses clever design to turn itself off once you have turned it on. This does the same thing with the elevator of the WRO Art Center in Wroclaw, Poland. The one difference is that it continually turns itself on and off.

He rigged up a pulley system that travels through the stairwell of the building. Whenever the elevator door on the top floor opens it causes the call button on the bottom floor to be pressed. The same thing happens when the elevator reaches the ground floor. But he didn’t stop there. Since the device is just wasting electricity whenever the elevator moves without passengers in it, he added a meter to track the loss. It’s the guts of a printing calculator strapped to the inside of the car. Every time the doors open it adds to the total.

You can see the installation in the video clip after the jump.

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Water-powered Multi-channel Audio

[Niklas Roy] is rolling out some water-powered music for Berlin’s Museum night. It seems that this water-wheel is attached to the side of the Museum. It’s got a stream flowing past it and the wheel is constantly turning. The thing is, that work isn’t being used for anything. Now we’ve already seen [Niklas] making electricity from moving water, but that’s far from what he had in mind this time around. Instead he’s driving a multitude of music boxes with the motion transferred from the water.

He teamed up with another artist named [La belle Imira] to build and connect a series of pulleys to the waterwheel. The video after the break shows the rope system being strung throughout the grounds of the museum. After passing around the output drum of the water wheel, the rope snakes through each pulley. Many of the pulleys have the mechanism from a music box attached to their axles, so whenever the water is flowing, music plays. They don’t all play the same tune, so you get a variety of selections as you walk around. We could swear that one of them is playing ‘My Way’.

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Window Curtain Moves To Screen Pedestrians

[Niklas Roy] built a motorized window curtain to screen out foot traffic in front of his window. When you hear “motorized curtain” you may think that this will move up and down but it doesn’t. Instead, the small curtain move horizontally to cover passersby as they travel down the sidewalk. This is accomplished using a camera in conjunction with some motion sensing software. In the video after the break you can see that the software also anticipates the movement, and ends up doing a good job of keeping the target covered. That’s thanks to the Processing sketch working in conjunction with a rotary encoder on the hardware setup. Details for both are available on the page linked above.

This harkens to other community involvement hacks we’ve seen like the subway stair piano, or the bottle recycling video game. It’s fun and quirky, which is not too much of a surprise as we saw a glimpse of that when we looked at [Niklas’] public fountain hydropower generator.

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