Re Cycle beneath the wheel

The Creator stage in progress

People, myself included, talk about reducing our "carbon footprint", a term about to disappear from overexposure the same way any word repeated over and over loses its meaning as it is replaced by noise. At the same time we blog about it, consuming terawatts of carbon producing power exacerbated by the inefficiency of bloated operating systems, the apparently innocuous white screen of Google, by the energy consumed by the avatars in virtual worlds that need to be kept virtually alive by the server nodes and the computers around the world that hum incessantly without any hope of ever being silent.

Our self-made society has plugged a cannula into our collective vein, to transfuse itself into the mind of the machine, which like a life support system we cannot disconnect, or at least we think we can't, that is, until the plug is pulled by the system itself when no longer needs any more information, other than the one it itself generates.

WW II direct interhuman syringe.

That is the story of The Creator with which we are trying to portray, using puppetry as a transference medium, the stark reminder of our self-dependency. Who or what controls who or what?

On to the practicum.

Since I detest plastic and the many woes and sickness that has come as a result of its indiscriminate use, I try to target it as a primary candidate for recycling, which is just a palliative approach to the real problem. In any case, I took the vacuformed package of the "energy saving" bulbs that we use nowadays, and just as I was about to send it into its recyling path, I noticed a form which reminded me of ancient alchemical apparatuses which I needed to create for the robotic-marionette stage. So here is the process:






The background, built over the "hardware cloth" is semi-translucent, with the most translucent parts being the "genetic" containers which will transmute common information into a panacea.

A digital projector, fed with data generated imagery will fill up the vessels as well as create the fluid digital environment where the Creator lives.


Here is the very first test as seen from behind, where I am trying unsuccessfully to line up, scale and correct the angle distortion. As you can see I missed the mark by a few centimeters. I am now in the process of positioning the elements as close as I can to the target, given the limitations of inexact everything.

Give me a big enough lever...

The real servos finally arrived! here is the Hi-Tech HS-805BB Mega Giant Scale Servo being tested. I simply attached one of the many great horns and plates that it comes with to my fish-line spool, using its own screw and voilà! 19.8 / 24.7 kg*cm (4.8V/6V) of torque! It is temporarily held in place with straps as you can see because as you can imagine the square holes of the Vex plates don't line up with anything but their own stuff (I promised I would stop bitching about it!)

For the rest of the controls I am using the HS-645MG UltraTorque Metal Gear Servos that have 7.7 / 9.6 kg*cm (4.8V/6V) of torque, very much on the safe side.

On the left of the picture you see Vex's red optical encoder which I planned to use to determine the position of the continuous rotation motors that lift the arms, but again, not even the extremely versatile Make controller could recognize the simple signal. I am sure it can be done but why waste time. I ordered a set of high-res 10 turn potentiometers that are not only more precise but can "hold" the last position even when the power is turned off.

Snap to grid

Serious construction begins. This has to be, want it or not, the last stretch of the building process for the Creator stage.

But before I begin this section I want to share a tip that I take for granted, but friends that see it are always amused by it. You know that when you work on a project involving dozens or hundreds of small pieces, screws, washers and what not, things like to go amiss. Lost socks pale in comparison, specially when you lose a servo screw that you won't find in any hardware store (unless you live in the Bay Area, how I miss that!). And ordering a screw or two online just does not cut it.

So, I use a big magnet block (which I don't remember where I got) and simply and literally throw all those little pieces at it, even from quite a distance and it just snaps them as they try to go by. Sometimes I am working on an odd position, (upside down ?) and as I disassemble something, which happens more and more often as I try to refine my design, I start collecting all these little pieces in my hand and mouth that are eager to disappear in the cracks of the floor or my stomach. Well, just toss'em up like a chef flipping pancakes towards the magnetic field and , snap! they are not going anywhere.

Now, mind you that this is not a very powerful magnet, like those neodymium or ceramic magnets that you find in hard drives otherwise getting a washer back would probably be impossible, but it is strong enough to hold quite a bit of stuff. Sometimes you cannot even see the magnet anymore, just a weird nut screwy sculpture. I'll add a pic like that so you can see it.

What was I thinking...

Just to finish the pulley rant, I created a template to drill the round wood pieces that I bought (99c/bag) at the local craft store. They seemed perfectly round in the bag...



Much to my surprise (am I new? or what!) they were far from round, I found out when I tried to fit them in my template. To make it short, I sanded them enough to fit, drilled and glued them together. As I was venting my frustration for not finding proper pulleys, my wife who works next to me in the studio, asked why I did not use the spools that she uses for her beading or the ones that I use for stringing (fish line) the marionette.

DUH!

I must be very tired, been sleeping 4 hours max for months now. why didn't I think of the spools which were in front of me? So, here, I have a steady supply of the perfect size/weight spools.


I only needed to create bushings to adapt to the servos, real servos that is, not the modified ones by Vex which of course have a "proprietary" square shaft that only fits their kit stuff, I still cannot get over their lack of foresight and integration with the rest of the world. So much for Open Anything! Dean Kamen, you know much better than that!

I created the bushings with an aluminum rod that happened to have the right diameter.
I drilled the shaft hole to attach the Hi-Tech servos I will probably use, notched them to hold the adhesive better and epoxied them to the spools.

The Beauty of the Fall

The beauty of the Püterschein system is, as you can see in this picture, that the puppet assumes very natural positions with no human intervention. I just cut the string that held it up and it fell on its knees just like that! A true predecessor of inverse kinematics!.


It seems like it is praying for arms, looking intently at the cut rods that will give it the expressiveness it needs.


I cut an old broom stick to use for the arms, thinking that it was pine and it would save me some time if it already had a round shape. Ha! I don't know what kind of wood it is, but it was hard as oak and I have gone through a whole set of carbon steel blades just cutting it down to shape. It has taken me three full days to get them ready for testing! So much for saving time...





You can see the Creator now just standing naturally, again with only spine support. I did not pose it, other than bringing it down to contact a surface. Can't wait to have the entire body functional. In case you are wondering the "feet" will be (at least that is the plan) two slim inverted cones. We'll see how it behaves. As for hands it will have none in this iteration, since it will be all dressed up and have very long sleeves like the human performer in an earlier post:
you can see it here and in the original design so you get the idea.


This is a detail of the hip and waist rigging that holds and constrains those parts as the marionette flexes and moves.



After three days, a few cuts and sore muscles overall, the arms are close to ready. I've tested them and they move gracefully and have the needed range. Under the torso you can see the channel I gouged out to make room for a couple of screw eyes to pass the string that connects it to the waist and hip.

Next task: the HEAD! this will be interesting since it will have a wooden core or "skull" and it will wear a "self animated" mask, a fancy way of saying it will have some springs to react to any movement of the head. If I have time, which I doubt, I would like to put a micro-servo on the latex mask so that it can have a range of expressions in addition to the eyes. Lorena, who designed the original creature does not like the idea. Perhaps she is right. The simplicity of the spring solution, which we have demonstrated on performance gives such a varied range of expression to the Creator's face that adding more might be less. So there!