Planet Arduino

If you’re ever driving through rural Finland about an hour south of Jyväskylä, you might come across the Haihatus art center. That includes KITA, “the house of kinetic arts.” You’ll recognize it right away by its bold swaths of vibrant paint. And if you come by at night, you’ll see the snow illuminated in dancing colors by a kinetic art installation built by Niklas Roy and Kati Hyyppä.

Because the building is unheated and can reach temperatures as low as -30°C (-22°F), KITA remains closed through the winter. Roy and Hyyppä approached this project with the goal of turning the building itself into a kinetic art piece for people to enjoy through the cold months. To achieve that, they lit the windows and added movement. Lights inside the building move along tracks and motors pull them with spools of twine. An Arduino Nano development board controls the motors through H-bridge drivers. Various reflectors and filters alter the lights as they move.

To make that even more dynamic, they animated the illumination and introduced sound. A control box built into an old tool case contains another Arduino Nano that can switch the lights through relays. That Arduino also generates sounds and melodies from algorithms based on random inputs, but synced to the lights. 

This project came with unique challenges related to the weather, as many electronic components act unpredictably at these extreme temperatures. But the installation worked well enough to unveil on New Year’s Eve 2023, when the people living in the town of Joutsa got to enjoy the dazzling inauguration.

The post This kinetic light installation illuminates the Finnish snow appeared first on Arduino Blog.

The great thing about art is that it doesn’t have to serve a purpose. When utility is irrelevant, the artist is free to express their creativity in whatever way they like. A painting doesn’t have to inspire introspection or revolution — it can just be something pretty to look at. In the same vein, Eirik Brandal’s Intermittent Luminal Phase kinetic sculpture is both gorgeous and useless.

Brandal started this project as an excuse to experiment with his new CNC router. Cutting gears seemed like a good way to do so, but he didn’t have a need for any mechanism that utilized them. That led him to the concept of a kinetic sculpture and Intermittent Luminal Phase is the result. It spins endlessly, making noise and blinking lights. But it is almost hypnotizing to see in action.

An Arduino Nano Every board controls two motors that spin a central input shaft, which turns all of the other gears. The gears aren’t perfect and produce a fair amount of vibration, but Brandal converted that bug into a feature. He added a piezo element that picks up the vibrations. Those are then amplified and pumped out through a speaker on the sculpture. The gears also have LEDs that make contact through DIY slip rings, so they light up at certain points in the rotation.

It may not serve a purpose, but Intermittent Luminal Phase is still mesmerizing and a great project for practicing fabrication techniques.

The post This kinetic sculpture is incredibly mesmerizing appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Voroni moves in a smooth and organic way, thanks to some creative thinking.

Read more on MAKE

The post Use Arduino, Sensors, Servos, and LEDs To Create Life-Like Behavior appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Voroni moves in a smooth and organic way, thanks to some creative thinking.

Read more on MAKE

The post Use Arduino, Sensors, Servos, and LEDs To Create Life-Like Behavior appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

[Guido] was recently commissioned to build a kinetic sculpture for a client who wanted something unique. What he came up with is really awesome.

It’s called ORBIS: The Wooden Kinetic & Lighting Sculpture. It mounts to the wall and provides a focal point for the room – a bright flashy spinning one at that! Does it just stay there and do random things? Nope, of course not! [Guido] built it with a unique control box, two Arduino 2560’s and an Xbee to communicate between them.

He was told to design it using old and new technologies so he’s got a rotary phone dial on the side of the box which allows the user to change through the different modes.

Switches on top also let you change the color of the sculpture and the speed at which it moves around. Since it’s wireless it can be easily set on the coffee table and become an instant conversation starter.

See it in action after the break.

‘Social Vibes’ is a Masters Degree (MSc.) project, in Interactive Media by Cian McLysaght, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. They shared with us their project, running on Arduino Uno, composed by a physical artifact designed and created specifically for an installation adopting the fundamental sound mechanisms used in a vibraphone, know also as a ‘Vibe’:

The instrument consists of twelve musical tones of different pitches. The music created on the instrument is derived from a continuous stream of input via multiple users on Twitter and the explicit interaction from Twitter users, tweeting the instrument directly to the project’s, “@vibe_experiment” Twitter account. Data associated with the emotional status of Twitter users, is mined from the Twitter network via Twitter’s open source, application programming interface (API).

For example if a user tweets “The sun is out, I’m happy”, the code I’ve written will strip out key words and strings associated with the user’s emotional state, within the tweets, ie “I’m happy”, and translate this to a musical notation. Mining Twitter’s API, allows a continuous stream of data. These emotional states are then mapped to specific notes on the physical musical instrument, located in a public space. The tempo of the musical expression will be entirely based upon the speed and volume of the incoming tweets on the Twitter API.

Twitter users who are both followers and non followers of the musical instrument’s Twitter account (@vibe_experiment) can tweet directly to the instrument and this direct interaction will be given precedence, allowing user’s who tweet directly to have their emotional state ‘played’. This allows users to hijack or take over the instrument and experiment with it in a playful manner, but also allows those with musical knowledge the potential to compose simple musical arrangements. When users are not tweeting the instrument directly, then the instrument will revert to mining the Twitter API.

To entice users to interact and observe the action of the instrument there is a live streaming broadcast of the instrument via Twitcam on the Vibe’s Twitter account. This is a live streaming broadcast of the instrument via Twitcam on the @vibe_experiment account. Twitcam, is Twitter’s built in live-streaming platform. This simply requires a webcam and a valid Twitter account.

The instrument constantly tweets back updates to it’s own Twitter account to not only inform people of the general status but also to engage users to interact directly with the ‘Vibe’.