Peter Hunziker, boat construction engineer from Switzerland speaks fluent Portuguese and helps us with the workshop. The preparations require serious in depth discussions, though:

Yesterday we carried out some serious umbrella shopping in São Paulo for the upcoming Umbrellapghone workshop at Prototype festival:

I’m back from my residency in Poland and here’s what I’ve built there:

It is a simple rope and pulley mechanism which moves the elevator in the WRO Art Center continuously between the 1st and 2nd floor. The system is powered by the sliding doors of the elevator.

Click here for a more detailed description of the project.

As I wrote already earlier, I’m spending one month in the beautiful Polish city of Wroclaw. I’m already fluent with saying “dzień dobry” and “dziękuję” in local tongue – but that’s it so far. If your Polish skills exceed mine, you might understand the subtitles in this interview, which the Goethe Institute has filmed in prior to my residency. If not, you might still understand me talking German:

WRO Art Center and Goethe Institute Krakow invite me for one month to Wroclaw, in order to make a free project, there.
The trip starts tomorrow. I have no clue what I’ll produce, so I packed the 42 essentials of my workshop into a suitcase. It’s a little bit of everything:

1. working gloves
2. sturdy red rope
3. switching power supply +12V/+5DC/-5V
4. various IC’s (microcontrollers, 555 timers, opamps, darlington driver arrays, …)
5. cutting mat
6. loooooooooong measuring tape (50m)
7. RC servo, proto boards, LCD display (2×40)
8. little boxes with many little electronic components (resistors, capacitors, switches, transistors, sensors, photostuff, usb to TTL serial board, …)
9. measuring tools
10. swiss army knife
11. pens and other drawing gear, cutters and blades
12. little vise
13. saws
14. pocket calculator
15. flat wrenches
16. camera
17. hand tools (files, pincers, screwdriver)
18. thread cutters
19. tweezers
20. springs
21. more tools (shitty small dremel style no-name drilling machine, cutting discs, gas soldering iron, screwdrivers, nippers, screwdrivers)
22. funny blue masking tape, desolder pump above
23. brass tubes, welding rods
24. re-usable heavy duty tie wraps
25. even more tapes (double sided, gaffa) … and a little white netbook power supply below
26. glasses
27. laboratory power supply
28. multimeter
29. a bunch of rubber gloves
30. safety goggles
31. ratchet belt
32. ear protection with built in FM radio
33. tie wraps
34. crocodile cables
35. a plastic jar of rubber bands
36. soldering stand
37. cheap slow netbook
38. pocket oscilloscope (never understood how to use it – maybe I’ll have to find out in Poland)
39. from left to right: soldering iron, AVR-ISP programmer, external 500GB harddisk, leatherman – and a gas torch above
40. drill bit set, solder and wires on its left, hammer and glues on its right
41. little good audio recorder, cheap headphones
42. memory card

I also asked the WRO Art Center to provide me with

• a cordless power drill,
• an electric jigsaw,
• plenty of multiplugs,
• a stereo,
• a table,
• good working light,
• and a sofa.

The latter items aren’t depicted here, as I’ll be confronted with them not before tomorrow afternoon.

In the packed suitcase was even space left, which I filled with some more wires and tie wraps and sheets of PVC, ball bearings, …
Including the suitcase it’s alltogether 34 kilos of densely packed fun stuff for Wroclaw!

Let me tell you about ‘Hammer Synthesizer’, a multi-channel 1bit sound synthesizer inside a log of birch wood. It is played by hitting felt balls with a hammer. The device is made so simple, that I think it is worth to go a bit in detail.
So this will be a longer post, with codes and schematics, to help you to build your own funny synthesizer. – If you want.
There’s also a video of the thing in action at the end of this post.

Please recognize the felted duck hat on the photo above. It is an integral part of playing the hammer synthesizer. Who plays it has to wear this hat. The hat doesn’t serve any technological function, but audience always appreciates proper stage outfits of musicians. Just think of Lady Gaga.

I also want to tell a bit about where I made the synth: My girlfriend has recently been invited for a residency at Serde, an interdisciplinary art space in the little town Aizpute, which is in Latvia. Besides a ceramics studio, photo laboratory and many other nice workshops, Serde also has its own brewery. This was an additional good reason for me to visit my love there. And I have to say the beer at Serde is fabulous!
As soon as I arrived in Latvia, I took over the wood shop and started to work on a log of birch wood which eventually became the case of the synthesizer. My girlfriend and some other artists got meanwhile obsessed by the crafts of felting, which they’ve learned from the locals. That explains the felt ball interface and the duck hat.

I enjoyed the basic woodworking a lot. A physically demanding process, if you work without power tools! Fortunately, the home brewn beer gave me the required energy to carve the log into shape.

What you can see above is the cut out ‘container’ for the felt balls. Below is a picture of the electronics that I used inside the synthesizer.

It is basically an Atmega8, running on its internal 1MHz resonator. The electronics also has a 5V linear regulator, so it can be powered with a 9V battery. Later, I added a transistor as amplifier for the speaker.

But it can be built even more simple. On the drawing below, you can see a minimal circuit which will also work fine. Except the microcontroller, you only need a 100nF capacitor between +5V and ground. For the sound output, I’ve drawn a piezo speaker, as this won’t require any amplifier. As a power supply, you can use three or four 1.5V batteries (in my experience, the Atmega8 can handle anything between 4V and 6V).
For playing the different tones, the according input on PORTD has to be connected to ground. In my setup, I connected the metal part of the hammer with ground, while each felt ball was covered with conductive yarn. The felt balls were then connected via wires to the PORTD inputs of the controller. But of course, here you can be creative. The possibilities to build those switches are endless.

The code is so short, that I’ll post it straight here. It’s written in AVR GCC but it will compile with minimal adaptations also on an Arduino.

Finally, here’s a video of the instrument in action:

Credits to the duck hat go to Jonathan Cremieux. The felt balls were made by Kati Hyyppä. And Pauls Rubena is the hammer performer in the video.

My girlfriend Kati and me are invited to give a supercool workshop at “Prototype 1”, a festival about art, music and sustainability – which will happen this November in Sao Pãulo, Brazil.

We came up with the construction of anemometer inspired umbrella turbines. As you can see in the video, they are wind powered and they can drive music box mechanisms, soap bubble machines and probably some other funny things as well.
During the workshop, we will build plenty of them, together with local teenagers, and I can’t wait to see how a dense forest of spinning umbrellaphones and umbrellabubblemachines will look and sound like! I guess it will be amazing – and magic. And of course, I’ll let you know about the outcome!

The festival will be organized by Bungalow and the Goethe Institute.

A close look on the soap bubble mechanism.

All systems work fine.

The construction is rather simple: A piece of wire serves as flexible clutch between the turbine axis and the music box. I used this principle already here. It worked well back then, so it will be reused.

And of course this all looks nicest during sunset.

You can download all those photos in high resolution here.

I’m in Amsterdam right now. The appartment where I’m staying is located directly at a beautiful gracht. And scientific curiosity made me install an anemometer at one of the appartment’s windows.

These are the materials I used to build this anemometer: Wire, straws and paper party umbrellas.

Be prepared to find out more about umbrella-anemometry here on this website, soon!

The Poposchka team ( read my last blog post to find out who/what this is ) arrived in Berlin last night, where they have to deliver a letter to the ambassador of Costa Rica today!
They occupied my workshop as camping ground and served me right away with fabulous coffee from their sophisticated kitchen-in-a-crate. Isn’t it nicely built?

Frequent readers of my webpage and of my Twitter stream know that my lifestyle includes plenty of travels. And from now on, I do that with my supercool scooter/trolley-combination, which I recently built in Basel, Switzerland! The idea for the scooter came from my students – I will tell more about this a bit later. But first, I want to show you a photo of me on the scooter. Imagine, I’d be on the way, through the park, to the train station:

The cool thing about this contraption is, that the trolley (which is a very light old aluminum camera case with some add ons) can be quickly dismounted from the scooter. And the scooter can be folded – which comes quite handy when I store it in the train’s overhead bins.

As you can see, the scooter is also a bit modified. It has a special trolley mount fixed on it, that I built out of thick aluminum sheet, which was cut with a CNC plasma cutter. The trolley can be hung in this mount and fixed with a belt for comfortable scooting. Below is a short clip of the plasma cutter in action, and here are the design files of the mount to give you an idea of how it is constructed:

So, this fantastic idea of a scooter/trolley came from students at the Institute of Post Industrial Design at Basel’s art school, where I gave a workshop on building sophisticated crates a few weeks ago. My task was to help students to build multi purpose transforming crates for the institute’s upcoming exhibition, in which everything from transportation, exhibition architecture and the actual show pieces will be based on flight cases. It was a very nice workshop indeed, and we made a lot of cool things, out of which the scooter/trolley was my favorite one. It was the project of Felicia Schäfer, Sandra Kessler and Georg Egli, who mounted flight cases on scooters in order to do a Summer travel messenger performance with it. Here, Georg and Felicia are working on their crate:

Felicia’s, Sandra’s and Georg’s idea is to provide a delivery service called Poposcha (from Pop-up and Matryoschka ). First, they will set up stands in downtown Basel using their flight case scooters, which can be handily transformed into little counters. On those counters, people can leave messages of their choice, whether it be a note on a paper, a small gift to a friend, a recorded song or a message in a bottle. In addition to Switzerland, messages can be sent even to neighboring countries. The messages will be delivered with the scooters, using also occasionally public transportation. Basel is only the starting point for Poposchka, and the little traveling delivery service will migrate to different cities and countries during Summer 2012. You can follow Poposcha’s adventures here: www.poposchka.ch

So if your email doesn’t work next month, you might want to get in touch with them (via phone, or so) – because maybe, they can deliver your messages then, too.

Here’s another picture of Felicia with a weight model (two containers filled with water) and the (not yet completely finished) stand setup on the right side.

Good luck on the trip in August, Poposchka!
And btw. – you can find more hires photos of my scooter/trolley here.