BODE: Audrey Fox’s Final Project

Bode is a kinetic sculpture for high-end design consumers which restores analog weather reading to the home and conjures thoughts of enchanted objects.

Reading BODE is simple, the longer the cord, the higher the value. The cords are differentiated by unique pendants, much as a wall clock has a big hand and a little hand. BODE relates general idea of weather instead of a precise number. A glance relays the feeling for the weather of a day. BODE tells you something new everyday, it is unobtrusively part of your domestic space. Users will grow accustomed to recognizing patterns and gain a deeper connection the the weather outside.

BODE relies on the weather Underground API. It’s data content is being parsed with JSON and hosted on my master server, my Raspberry Pi. I used this tutorial to set up my rPi and router peppermintButler to run as a web server. The way this system is set up, an edition of BODEs could exist, all networked to my central server. Inside of BODE I originally used an Arduino Uno with a wifi shield but ended up switching over to an Arduino YUN for more stable connection. The precipitation and temperature points map to spooling motor movement.

Precedents:

During my presentation I cited two important precedents: AiryLight and Piece of Sky. AiryLight by Annelie Berner, a New York based designer, uses light and a motor to express air quality data in the home. The focal lens raises and lowers casting a pattern on the ceiling which softly projects the data. Patch of Sky, by Italian group Fabrica, is a beautiful lighting fixture. It also displays changes in local meteorological data. As one of eleven weather conditions is met and the corresponding gradient animation plays, a colorful vision of the sky outside is projected through the glass surface. There are many more projects which inspired me.  For an annotated list of these writings and projects, visit this link.

Audience:

The demographic I am considering, late 20s to mid 30s design minded technology progressives, are widely concerned with the curation of lifestyle. Instagram and the influx of lifestyle design focused magazines, such as Kinfolk, highlight a the desire to be more present within our homes and conscious with our time, screen time included. Ubiquitous screen time is not wholly desirable within lifestyle design. Media Diets, where one takes deliberate breaks from internet and other media outlets, as well as screen free retreats are growing increasingly common with this set. Trends like this relate the growing desire to create ideal experiences as one would once curate the contents of a beautiful home. The selection of well designed objects that are informative, beautiful, and peripheral is central to Lifestyle Design. BODE reflects this demographic’s values by providing a contemporary refined alternative to consulting a screen or an old fashioned thermometer when dressing for a day’s activities.

Closing note:

I’m excited about BODE and will be refining the build and code for a small production run in the near future.

Github link 

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Audrey’s Midterm

 Private Nymph: IoT Fall 2015

I used servos and a login based web interface to hide the form of a bather behind fern leafs. This project is referencing ownership and voyeurism in context of the bathing-nymph-as-object-of-desire trope. If the sculpture is activated with someone nearby the LED will activate, further highlighting the 3d printed form.

Inputs: name, password, submit button, view button, close button, ultrasonic sensor

Outputs: one LED and two servo motors

Parse Database: login information

Video of the 1st Arduino based prototype + My code here.

RFDUINO HW

Alonso and I worked together on the host and device rfduino code (mine here) . I thought it would be entertaining to use red and blue LEDs and a piezo as outputs for the two buttons, having a Matrix style choice. I set up the circuit for output and Alonso did the button inputs. I added silly serial read outs for setup and the button/light activations. If you chose the blue Led setup it would read “Boo lame” and if you chose red “ENTER THE MATRIX!” would print to serial. Yeah, it was late. Haha.

We got the setup working, but faced consistent hardware difficulties and missed our opportunity to video document the working setup before things went awry. Lesson learned. I am still working through the potentiometer and rfduino part. I’ll update this post with documentation as soon as that work is completed.

Mail Reading Response

https://vimeo.com/101332523

Mail me a surprise.

After moving away from Philadelphia, my college town, I dearly missed my close community of art school friends. One of the activities that we had done countless times during undergrad was collective doodling. So, to stay connected we began a version of this game through the mail. I would draw an abstract bit of scribbles in Austin and send them to Philadelphia where they would be added to and sent back, often making several cross country rounds as more and more pages in various states of completion were added into the envelopes. I thought about this experience very fondly while reading about the elaborate collages and even chairs being sent through the mail.

Mail is such a joyful and visceral expression that I have continued to use the medium. A couple years ago I started a Valentine exchange. Each spring myself along with a group of a dozen or so artistic women from all across the country make an edition of valentines and mail them to each other. The results have ranged from tiny sculptures to lavender sewn sachets, augmented reality and of course, glitter bombs. It’s an experience in itself to receive a steady stream of bright envelopes filled with friend-love. Mail is tactile, it’s object worship, it’s a forgotten art.

Alarm Project and learning curves

Basically, I built an alarm which lights up and plays music. Here’s my code. At first I wanted to use a potentiometer to set age as a parameter for the length of the alarm time. Different ages need different sleep. I’m interested in augmenting sleep hygiene. I wonder, should we be in total control of our sleep timing? Considering the unhealthy sleep patterns of many modern people, I wonder.  The thought of connected and augmented sleep ties into my midterm idea. I did some sketches/notes, see below.

All good and fine in theory. Then it falls apart.

Let the hurdles begin: First, the potentiometer is problematic to use with javascript, as it is best with digital, so I reevaluated my functionality. I set up a ball switch for the circuit to turn off the alarm. Then, low and behold the npm library which I had chosen was pulling up a ‘window’ error- it wasn’t playing well with rPi. Ugh. Reboot!

My second time around I set up the node-aplay library. And it worked! Kind of. The file plays as static. 😦 I tested it on ‘omxplayer music.mp3’ and the file works. I’m stumped! Have to run this by Ayo in class.

On the bright side, I’ve learned a massive amount about how the libraries function! I’ve now played audio on my Pi and used Cyberduck to send a file and edit code on my PI! And my alarm code/pcomp does work!

ps! i forgot that we were doing wordpress for the blog so i posted on tumblr. oops!