sculpture

40 Articles

What Could Possibly Go Wrong Giving A Robot A Chainsaw?

August 5, 2014 by 15 Comments

Chainsaw wielding robot

[Morgan Rauscher] is a rather eccentric artist, inventor, maker, professor… jack of all trades. His latest project is called the Art-Bot – and it’s an 8′ robotic arm equipped with a chainsaw. Did we mention you can control it via arcade buttons?

He’s been building sculptures for over 10 years now, and has enjoyed observing the evolution of automated manufacturing – from CNC machines to laser cutters and even now, 3D printers. He loves the technologies, but fears machines are making it too easy – distancing us from the good old physical interaction it once took to make things with a few simple tools. His Art-Bot project attempts to bridge that gap by bringing tactile transference to the experience.

The cool part about the Art-Bot is that it is mostly made of recycled materials – in particular, bicycle parts!

Making a robot from bicycle parts is really not that difficult, and I highly recommend it.

The rest of the robot consists of electric actuators (linear), the control circuitry, and of course — a chainsaw. For safety’s sake, [Morgan] also built a polycarbonate wall around it to protect users from it going on a murderous rampage wood chips and other debris thrown from the robot.

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Adding A Lot Of Twinkle To This Rebar Sculpture

March 7, 2012 by 11 Comments

Blinky lights have a way of attracting attention and that’s exactly what the members of the Maui Makers hackerspace were shooting for. The sculpture above is the logo for the Source festival, a Burning Man inspired music gathering in the Aloha state. For this year’s festival they went crazy, installing twelve meters of RGB LED strip controlled by seven Arduino boards.

The goal was to make the twelve-foot tall sculpture into a lighted interactive showpiece. In addition to the LEDs it includes a microphone, capacitance sensors, Bluetooth connectivity, and a piezo speaker. There’s one Arduino to rule them all, with another Teensy controller to drive an LCD display in the control box, and five Teensy boards to address the LED strips. They grabbed [Bill Porter’s] Easy Transfer library to facilitate communication between the microcontrollers (his libraries are becoming popular, we just saw his mp3 shield library used in another project on Tuesday).

The code which drives the LED animations is based on some Adafruit examples. We really enjoy the waving flag effect seen in the clip after the break.

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Create And Conflagrate Giant Modeled Sculptures With Kinect And CNC

June 8, 2011 by 7 Comments

Summer has hit, and with it a bunch of crazy people going to crazy festivals and (often) burning crazy sculptures to crazy music! In that vein [Matthew Goodman] recently got involved in the burning flipside community down in Texas for his first big effigy build.  The project called for a gigantic archway flanked by two human shaped figures, since he had been working in Kinect [Matt] decided to try his hand at physically modeling the figures from Kinect mesh data.

After co-registering the depth and image cameras, setting up a capture routine to record, getting  .ply based meshes from the depth camera, and making a keypoint detector [Matt] was ready to start getting real world data from the Kinect. Armed with a ghetto steadycam built from his local Austin Hackerspace‘s spare parts bin, [Matt] proceeded to collect three 1.5 gigabyte scans of the charming [KT], who served as a model for the sculpture.

Once the meshes were imported to sketchup they could be merged and smoothed into a coherent form. The figure was split into CNC-able parts (known as the “lady bits” by [Matt] and his crew) and sent to local makers [Dave Umlas] and [Marrilee Ratcliff]’s ShopBot CNC mill. The 400 some odd bits of wood were then carted to flipside, methodically set up, and promptly set aflame the end of the event.

We have seen a couple of really interesting burning man projects, but this is possibly the shortest lived end result. Stay tuned this summer for more insane Black Rock City bound creations as well. Also don’t forget to check out [Matt]’s site for more details.

Recycled Sound – An Art Installation Not Lacking Arduinos

March 17, 2011 by 6 Comments

[oakkar7] wrote in to show us [Ben Johansen] and [Jonathan Snow]’s  interactive art installation, Recycled Sound(Website has a virus). The exhibit will premiere  in the TWU Arts Triangle Walking Tour March 25th from 5-7pm.

Currently a work in progress, the final plan is for the outdoor installation to feature a podium in the center with a rotating top, and various islands surrounding. As the podium’s top is rotated the surrounding islands come to life with a variety of light and sound displays which vary depending on how the podium is turned. While the electronics are not recycled, the actual sculptures and music making elements themselves consist of scrap yard parts and factory waste.

The whole display runs off of 12.. yes TWELVE Atmel 328s with Arduino boot loaders! The center podium houses a transmitting circuit consisting of two atmega 328s with Arduino boot loaders sharing a crystal, an hmc 6532 magnetometer breakout board and two RF transmitters.  The Islands each contain a receiving module with, obviously,  an Arduino and RF receiver. The receiving Arduinos connect to opto isolated switching modules for motors and lighting. Check out [Ben]’s blog for in progress shots, code, and build information.

If you are looking to control some 12V motors/lights with your 5V Arduino be sure to check out the pictures in the blog. While we here at Hackaday may be quick to jump into soldering [Ben] follows the proper development progression to the letter. Each aspect is bread boarded, then refined, then transferred to a soldered perf board.

update: His site has some kind of malware going on. None of us noticed it in Firefox, but after complaints we fired up ol IE. Yup, nastyness there. You can go there at the following link if you dare.

More after the jump:

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Kinetic Sculpture Takes A Page From Modern Life

December 20, 2010 by 24 Comments

The blurry image above is a snap of toy cars as they zoom around a multi-lane, multi-level, maniacal-maze called Metropolis II. We originally took a look at the video after the break (do it now!) but found more information on [Chris Burden’s] kenetic sculpture in this NYT article. He and eight studio artists began work on the project back in 2006. They built 1200 custom designed cars and gave them a huge city to traverse, with up to 18 lanes at times. The work is not yet done, and the video below is dated (having been filmed in 2009), but project is slated to conclude in about two months and the installation has already been snapped up by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

And here we thought this was the product of an out-of-work packaging system design engineer. Nope, it’s art, and it certainly eclipses other kinetic sculptures we’ve seen.

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New Term For Art: Sculptural Robotics

September 21, 2010 by 10 Comments

[Dan Roe] has been working on Sculptural Robotics for quite some time, and most recently presented his newest creation: Solar Flowers 2010. Typically, Sculptural Robotics (coined by [Dan] himself) are stand alone, static art presentations made from electronic components and wire. [Dan] of course has taken it quite a bit further; giving all his sculptures life using solar panels, motors, engine circuits, and more. Making them zero emission, and beautiful at the same time. You can catch four videos after the jump of his moving sculptures. Not that we’re picking favorites, but the dragonfly is pretty amazing if we do say so ourselves.

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Perpetual Ball Roller

July 29, 2009 by 45 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te9X4VRj8dU]

This interesting little sculpture caught our eye. Called the Perpetual Ball Roller, it simply rolls a ball on a track. It has both manual and automatic modes with variations in the automatic mode to keep it amusing. This is very elegant, and would be fun to have sitting around to play with. The only problem is the noise. The servo that he is using is quite loud. What could he do to make it function silently?

[via Instructables]