Saturday we made an order for 250 triacs, 250 opto-isolators and 1,000 15k resistors. They should be coming in some time next week and that’s when our progress will really take off. With this shipment we’ll be able to make each light bulb have independent control with an Arduino Mega, the newest Arduino micro-controller, which we’ll be able to control 2, 8 ft by 8ft panels holding 64 lights.
We’ve also launched our new website for the project, right now located at http://discobox.politeauthority.com/ Hopefully once we get the order in things will start moving faster so we’ll be ready in time for Artscape, but we’ll see!
So far 2009 has been an absolutely great year for me, a few weeks ago I bought my first car, a BMW Bavaria made in 1971. I picked it up off a friend who’s a BMW mechanic out in Hampden, and is moving to Ireland in a month. So.. in short I got the car in great shape, probably the best shape a 38 year old car could be, and I picked it up for almost nothing. Basically, I’m ecstatic.
Along with the car I got work history going all the way back to 1986, the year of my birth, and tons of original literature and documentation that came with the car. From what I can tell the Bavaria has been in Maryland it’s entire life.
I just got it registered last week, with historic plates, and it drives like a dream, I’m a total BMW fan-boy now, what can I say? My car was part of what BMW called “The New Six”, which was their emergence into the luxury sports car market. Here’s a couple great ads from “The New SIx” ad campaign, both are Bavaria’s from ’71.
Now that the semester is almost over I’m finally finishing up the re-design of Polite Authority, and here we are. Lot of stuff is still going to need tweaking and updating but as a whole the site is functioning and that’s more then I could say previously. I’m working on a whole bunch of different things as usual, so I’ll just lay them all out here once and leave it at that! Disco Boxing
As I mentioned before disco boxing is moving along well and the site explaining and documenting the project is coming up shortly. The basic premise of the project is to create a box witch is 8 ft by 8ft by 8ft and covered in Edison 20 watt light bulbs, 256 to be exact. In the middle of the room there will be a punching bag suspending from the ceiling rigged with pressure sensitive switches and contact microphones to record the hits from the user. Then with that information create different lighting animations with the surrounding room, all which is being computed instantly while the user is punching the bag.
We’ve been accepted to join Artscape’s Midway this year and we’re all really excited about that. Once the semester ends this week most of my time will be dedicated to that project. Right now we are looking for sponsors, we’re able to offer advertisement space on the Midway at Artscape and we can even give a tax deduction through Artscape.
Nicaragua
This summer I’ll be going to Nicaragua for a month starting in July, and unfortunately missing Artscape. I’ll be in MICA’s summer abroad video program making a documentary about the trip and what we come across. Hopefully as the meetings leading up to the trip progress I’ll have more information about what exactly the intent of the trip is.
I also have a bunch of finals coming up, some of which I’ll want to post and I’ll make available through this site as the week progresses!
I was fixing a bunch of things getting ready to re launch my website and then a big drop in Internet connection, thank you Comcast, while I was moving some files around my server completely destroyed my old blog. No big deal really, just put me more behind schedule. Soon enough this whole thing will be put together!
So for now things are horribly buggy I’m sure, let mr know if there’s anything horrible stickig out that you think I should know about.
Saturday we made an order for 250 triacs, 250 opto-isolators and 1,000 15k resistors. They should be coming in some time next week and that’s when our progress will really take off. With this shipment we’ll be able to make each light bulb have independent control with an Arduino Mega, the newest Arduino micro-controller, which we’ll be able to control 2, 8 ft by 8ft panels holding 64 lights.
Disco Boxing
