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D.09 Tinkering and Circuit Refinement

To start with, I had a circuit which was powered by the 5v supplied by the Arduino. Rearranging the circuit, I chose to dismantle an LED torch to utilise 3 of its components (the cell casing which held 3 x 1.5v batteries, the switch and the LED) creating a larger circuit, that had it own light, and was is completely battery powered.

Splitting the voltage between two compnents, I was concerned that neither would have enough power to work correctly. When I initially set up the circuit, I decided to use a resistor with the LED because I didn’t know if it was going to be safe without one. Upon testing, I realised that the LED was not working at full brightness but the motor was at full speed. This indicated to me that the resistor I put in was unnecessary, and was further proven by my discovery of an existing resistor at the switch.

When the motor first powers up, the light does dim for a split second. I believe this will be due to the initial acceleration from rest and the extra power that the motor requires to do this. That aside, the circuit works well and I am ready to implement this with the rest of my mechanism.

D.08 Motor Testing

I have 3 DC Motor of different sizes to test and decide which will be the most appropriate for my project.

The circuit I have wired them up to contains an Ardunio (used for its 5V power supply) and potentiometer (used to control the flow of voltage) and the motor being tested. In my final circuit, I will used a 9V battery instead of the Arduino, the potentiometer will be locked to a certain level and replaced by a switch, and a lamp will also be connected to the circuit since, as I discovered in the previous post, a bright light will help the effect.

Testing

Motor A

Size: Small
RPM: Unknown
Grip: Poor (Something will need to be welded to the end to allow the motor to be incorporated into a mechanism)
Test video:
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Motor B

Findings

Firstly, the Motor C struggled to get going with only 5V of power, but I believe that using a 9V battery will assist this.

Secondly, I noticed that potentiometer only had control over the motors at the very end of its turn, making it behave more like a switch than anything else. Although I was able to slow Motor A down slightly with very small turning increments towards the end, I do believe that the RPM is still too great on this motor.

Despite this, Motor B is likely to perform the best for this experiment. Before welding my circuit together, however, I would like to try all 3 motors once more, but with the illusion pattern taped to the top. This will help me to gauge how fast a rotation is required to make the illusion work.

 

A.23 DIY Phone Speaker

Today I began sketching ideas for the DIY Phone speaker gif. What I have in mind is essentially a quick vector transition from form to form. Something that would stylistically look like this:

Contract Transform by Fredrik Andresen on Dribbble

Below are my sketches, there are many ingenious ways to amplify the sound from your mobile with objects found around the house. I chose the glass tumbler, the toilet roll tube, the coffee cup and the beer cans.

Thinking about the way they will all transition into each other depends heavily on the order. Here in my storyboard, I established one and elected to cut out the toilet roll tube model and instead incorporate that into the beer can model.

IMG_3222

On the phone screen, i’d like to display an equaliser to help sell the idea quickly (as this will be only 4 seconds long). From the Jailbreaker gif, i’ve learned that considering something like what to display on a mobile screen is a decision best made at the beginning of a project.

IMG_3218

These sketches are super crude, but this gif will have a quick turnover and all the assets will be rebuilt in Illustrator. So its good enough to enable the beginning of my production

Screen Shot 2017-04-04 at 12.34.16