Pop Up

  Submitted by admin on Tue, 12/30/2008 - 15:46
Bauhaus Bauspiel / pop-up

Pop UP is een levensgrote kijkdoos waarin kinderen hun eigen voorstelling met intelligente objecten maken. Verschillende zintuigen worden aangesproken, zodat een intuïtieve, spontane interactie ontstaat. De peuter kan actief aan de slag, dingen in beweging zetten maar ook gewoon luisteren en kijken. In alle vrijheid en op eigen tempo kunnen de jonge kinderen de interactieve theaterinstallatie Pop UP verkennen. Hierbij wisselen ze verschillende 'rollen'; ze zijn regisseur, acteur en toeschouwer tegelijkertijd.

program: 
Creative Learning Lab

Participants

Project Blog

Pop Up Play Testing

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society
Some images from the Pop Up play testing session in Almere. It was lots of fun to see the kids interact with the blocks. They climbed and slid down the blocks, created constructions and destroyed constructions. 

Pop Up Build Session

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society
Laser Cutting Speaker Holes in Foam

We used the laser cutter to cut out speaker holes from the foam material that's inside of each of the interactive pop-up boxes. The foam pieces are roughly 25mm thick, which is a little too thick for the laser cutter to cut the holes out perfectly. When working with thick materials it's best to try focusing the laser at the center of the material's thickness, rather than at the top of the material.  With materials thicker than 20mm it's impossible to focus at the center of the material, so I just adjusted to focus so that the laser is nearly touching the material. After the laser is finished cutting we had to pull out each of the foam holes by hand. 

Note the electric bread knife in the background, this is what we used to cut smaller pieces of foam from the larger blocks. It's not as effective as a hotwire cutter, but it does get the job done. 

Creating plexiglass housing for the electronic components

We created a series of press-fit plexiglass boxes to house all of the electronic components for the interactive pop-up boxes. Each box contained an Arduino with an Xbee shield, some speakers, an amplifier, voltage regulators, an Mp3 player and a large battery. Plexiglass is a good material for prototyping, as it's quick to cut new designs on the laser cutter, but we found out quickly that it wasn't strong enough to withstand being thrown around and jumped on.  

This box contained some vibrating motors, which were also created on the laser cutter. We created eccentric weights by cutting some 5mm plexiglass in the form of a semi circle and then attached the weights to the motor axel. 

The cylinder pop-up block was housed inside a PVC tube. It was pretty rugged, but the same could not be said of the plexiglass components inside the PVC tube. 

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Pop UP - de festival ruimte

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

Hierbij een aantal (slechte kwaliteits) foto's van de 2Turven Hoog festival ruimte voor pop UP:


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Pop UP - de intelligente blokken II

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

Blauwe blok - de lange balk

Groene blok - de driehoek

Witte blok - de kubus

The first block

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

The first block has been made!
The triangular sides are transparent plastic and the other sides are covered with Skai. A zipper makes it possible to open and close the triangle, for changes in the electronics.

LED strips have been positioned in the foam:
 
 

Kick off - de intelligente blokken

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab

Iedere blok is uitgerust met een set speakers en een accelerometer.

Vorm Input Output Uitleg
Kubus Wegzetten Licht (kleur) De kubus heeft aan drie zijden een lichtsensor zitten. De tegenoverliggende zijde is uitgerust met oplichtend vlak. Als je de lichtsensor bedekt, dan gloeit het tegenoverliggende vlak op. Dus op de grond ligt het naar de hemel gekeerde vlak op. In een hoek liggen alle drie de vlakken op. 
Cilinder Optillen,  wegzetten en rollen De cilinder kan uit zichzelf gaan rollen. In de cilinder zit een motortje/mechanisme waardoor de cilinder kan gaan rollen zodra hij op de grond gelegd wordt op de bolle zijde.  
Idealiter zou de cilinder moet gaan rollen in de omgeving van bijvoorbeeld de driehoek.
Driehoek Schudden Geluid Hard schudden geeft een zacht geluid, zacht schudden geeft een hard geluid.
Balk In elkaar drukken, overheen lopen, erop zitten Geluid In de balk zitten drie verschillende drukpunten. Onder ieder drukpunt zit een bepaald geluid (tik, tak, tok bijvoorbeeld). Als je de balk naar een andere zijde kantelt, dan zin het weer drie andere geluiden. 

De blokken reageren op elkaar op verschillende manieren:

- 4 in/out put blokken en 1 output blok

- setjes van blokken (driehoeken gekoppeld aan driehoeken etc)

- stille blokken, als blokken stilliggen dan worden ze output blokken van de andere wel bewegen

- de blokken zijn of input blokken of output blokken

Fablab Location: 
Waag Society
AttachmentSize
2009 01 21 TO DO PopUp.xls44.5 KB

Blok construction

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Creative Learning Lab
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

Nearfield Capacitance buttons

project: 
Pop Up
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

This system I m developing is meant for our pop up project, but can actually be used for whatever project.
It is nothing else than a kind of button which is activated if you come near the surface with your hand, or with another surface which has the same kind of button mounted.
The button consist of 2 plates of copper, which are charged. If you approach with another cube, the charging curve changes, and you get a signal. They dont need to touch each other in order to change the curve, if they are near each other, it works allready. Alternatly you can use your hand as well

Here a read out if they are near to each other: The red curve is the charging curve plottet. The green one when they are near each other.

I,ve testet it with neil Gershenfelds hello.step board with the following setup:

The graph you see above is the read out of this setup.

Next step is that I need more channels, since a cube has 6 sides. Also in order to make them function in both ways, you need to be able to change the input to an output and back.
Here is a 2 channel version of it ready made:

follow up soon

I hope an update follows soon.

crackle cube

project: 
Pop Up
program: 
Fab Academy

For the final project, I decided to build a working prototyp of one
possible block of the Bauspiel.
I call it 'Crackle cube', which is a cube of foam 35cm big, which you
can squeeze and make sounds like that. You should also be able to fling
it around and stand on it.
This prototyp is made out of readymades because of the given time.
Conceptualizing a dedicated circuit board for it is prosponed to 2009.
To me its more important that there is a object that you can grab,
touch and make music with it and fling it around. Even if it's working
partly analog, it has to make sound, thats a priority. We can then make
test with people and see how we develop it further

Live Sounds:
The sounds are made by touching different copper plates (max6). This is based on the original crackle box
made bij Michael Waisvisz/ Steim Amsterdam. Your body acts as a kind of
human resistor. It allways sounds different, therefore it's hard to
make the smae sounds every day.
To extend the possibility and timbre of sounds, I want to build a line
output to be able to put a modulation delay in between. A raw schematic
does exist:

Functions (and dreams):
1. create sounds by touching different koper plates and changing 3 oscillators like that
2. change the timbre of the sounds by squeezing the cube

3. record these sounds and your voice with the build in mic and the momentary switch

4. send your created loop to another object and play it there

5. improvise to your running loop, stop it and create another loop, or leave it going and record another one and put it
on top of the first one. Maximum 3 loops simultaniously

6. Detect position of cube with accelerometers, optional change ambient loop by spinning the cube.

This is a sketch of the cube in scale, with most of the components on
it. A explotion drawing will follow with named components. One
important thing you cant see here is the sleeve, which holds the foam
cube together, and is designed with wholes to be able to see the
interaction surfaces.

Process:
- prepare and machine the hardware (foam cube, milled out for sensors and switches etc.)
- creat athmosphare sounds (mi
- build in the electronics (arduino xbee and more readymades here)
- build and test wireless network

I succesfully cutted the whole cube into plates like in the 3d drawing above. Thanks to the Tefal electric breadsaw.
The Powerswitch and the 10k rotary resistor is mounted.
The crackle box extension has been tested with good results. Milling
the foam plates is fun and works quite well. Also I can now drive the
whole cube on a 12V accu borrowed from my makkita. Using a 9V regulator
(1A) i got enough power to drive all eletroics for hours, and its
fairly easy to load the accu again, and no more 9v batterie waste.

I made a simple plug on the laser for the accu, wraped it with copper foil and voila it works as the power source.

Finally i got the whole circuit connected, need to clean up the cable messthough.

Here are some test with laser cutting and engraving the sleeve material. It works fine for me.

And here the final cube, working.

Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

Networking

project: 
Pop Up
Fablab Location: 
Waag Society

This section could not have been done without the great help of Lodewijk Loos, a collegue from the Waag Society.

Thinking on the time frame for my final project, I decided to build a
network using arduinos and xbee's. On a later stage, I will explore
Neils networking hello boards.
What I needet to achieve is sending wireless read outs form an 3 axis accelerometer, and possibly from a compass sensor.
We started with the accelerometer because within the Waag Society, we have some experiance with that.
The basic setup which I could build in the final project looked like this:

On the receiver side, I just had the xbee in its socket of the
developer board connected to the computer. We made a ruby script and
used the open source audio player mpg123. This was an alternative to
the waveshield for arduino which we had ordered, but did not arrive in
time. The only draw back in the current application is that the sounds
are not played in the cube, but outside. On the other hand, in a later
stage we could play the sounds in another object which can be
interesting.
because we basically just needet 6 values for the directions, we scaled
down the values of the xyz accelerometer to x+ y- etc, so we could
attach a sound for every side of the cube.

Mesh networks:
Another reason why I used xbee's for the networking was that you can
have many of them in a broadcast mode. Again I want to learn how to do
this with Neils hello boards.