New work

Some new stuff that I'm messing about with....soil moisture sensors & plants!

Internet Wind

Internet Wind. Installed at the Holden Gallery MMU

Internet Weathervane

I built this weathervane to transmit environmental data across the web. It just spends its life gently swinging in the breeze, aimlessly broadcasting the information that it collects....day in....day out

I made this little gizmo to sit at the bottom of the weathervane. Its responsible for converting the kinetic/wind direction data into a digital signal ready for broadcast. Its quite a beautiful little object really.

The Internet of Things

This 'telepresence' project that I'm working on is closely linked to current debates surrounding "The internet of Things" - Here's a bit of information about that...

The Internet of Things (or IoT) describes the revolution already under way that is seeing a growing number of internet-enabled devices that can network and communicate with each other and with other web-enabled gadgets. Things (e.g. objects, environments, vehicles and clothing) will have more and more information associated with them and may have the ability to sense, communicate, network and produce new information, becoming an integral part of the Internet. A widespread Internet of Things has the potential to transform how we live in our cities, how we move, how we develop sustainably, how we age, and more.
-http://theinternetofthingg.eu

-Nick Appleyard, Head of Digital at the Technology Strategy Board:
The Internet of Things is one of the next major developments of the Internet and has the potential to unleash large scale investment, create jobs and bring substantial economic growth to many sectors of the economy. In some ways more and more information about ’things’ within buildings, transport systems, cars or cities is produced. But if these were both widespread and able to share information with each other and with us at large scale a world of opportunities would open up, leading to products with additional capabilities, more efficient processes and innovative business models.

-John Naughton from the observer:
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make infatuated with their own ingenuity. Witness the heady talk about "the internet of things". The basic idea is that we are moving from an era when the network connected human beings to one where a majority of the nodes on it will be devices: printers, cameras, monitoring devices, domestic appliances – yea even unto the humble toaster.

Two forces are driving this trend. The first is that sensors and actuators are increasingly being embedded in physical objects – from phones to roadways to pacemakers – which are linked via the internet. "When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly. What's revolutionary in all this is that these physical information systems are now beginning to be deployed, and some of them even work largely without human intervention." Full article here

How to: Connecting and receiving data from remote environmental sensors

This weekend I finally managed to complete my interface that will allow an anemometer (wind sensor) to control kinetic sculptures which could (theoretically) be placed on the moon. This post acts mainly as a log/set of instructions for myself and also for my own troubleshooting when I come to set up my installation at the gallery!! - those interested in using arduino and processing however, may find it useful...

1) download the Firmata arduino library for processing from here and put inside the libraries folder in the processing sketchbook.

2) upload OldStandardFirmata to the arduino board. I’m using an Arduino uno and find that this version of firmata works best. Note that arduino uno installs as '/dev/tt/usbmodem621' not 'dev/tt/usbSerial' as the older arduinos do...

3) Test that processing can access the serial data sent from arduino by running a sample processing sketch of a graph controlled by a simple arduino potentiometer circuit. I had a bit of trouble at this point – processing version 1.5 seemed to have trouble communicating with the serial port. I was getting all kinds of strange RXTX library conflict errors. There is a way around this by apparently deleting RXTX.comm.jar and librxtxSerial.jnilib from /library/java/extensions and replacing them with the same files from the arduino directory /Application/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java. I could’t be bothered spending any more time on this problem so I simply reverted back to processing 1.2.1 and everything worked fine.

4) Now comes the tricky bit, I had to configure my Sky (netgear) router to allow for port forwarding for all traffic attempting to connect to my server (mac pro) on port 5210 - since my ip address was a local network address (beginning 192.168.x.x) and not the actual address that external site can see (http://whatismyip.com) . More info on configuring netgear routers to enable port forwarding can be found here you could of course use dynamic dns

5) Once that was set up it was time to test my feed. I setup a simple arduino/potentiometer ciruit and used processing to read the value of the potti. Make sure the EEML library for processing is installed at this point, this is the Extended Environments Markup Language and is a protocol for sharing data between remote responsive environments. Processing then broadcasts this data in a simple xml format. Providing the port forwarding works correctly, you can access this xml file, and subsequent potentiometer reading from your browser http://localhost:5210 - amazingly, this worked first time for me!!

6) If that works its time to setup the internet stream. A processing sketch reads the serial data and uploads this to the remote site. Test the feed works in the browser.

7) Once the feed is tested and working ok, its time to build the system that is to be controlled by the remote sensor. To test this I used a simple servo connected to arduino. I uploaded the ServoFirmata that is included with the Arduino IDE. Another processing sketch runs on the remote machine (again using both the firmata arduino library and EEML library) which pulls down the data from the live feed and moves the servo accordingly. The code for this sketch took aaaages to write and was really really messy. Thats the hard bit done woohooooo, all thats left to do now is make my kinetic sculptures.

If you like anymore info on this please leave a comment or email me.

Convoluta

My good friend and colleague, Martin Greaves, of dinosaurmuseum.com Illustration & Design and author of Exhausted Renegade Elephant has written this amazing piece for my blog - cheers mate!

"I find your latest concept beautiful, poetic even. As a natural phenomena, the wind has not made such an impact on the art and poetry of mankind as, say, the sun, the moon, fire or water, the forests and trees, the animals; and yet it could be argued that our very future, the future of the planet lies in its hands. Wind is a form of solar energy. Winds are caused by the uneven heating of the atmosphere by the sun, the irregularities of the earth's surface, and rotation of the earth. Wind flow patterns are modified by the earth's terrain, bodies of water, and vegetation. Humans use this wind flow, or motion energy, for many purposes: sailing, flying a kite, and even generating electricity.

The terms wind energy or wind power describe the process by which the wind is used to generate mechanical power or electricity. Wind turbines convert the kinetic energy in the wind into mechanical power. This mechanical power can be used for specific tasks (such as grinding grain or pumping water) or a generator can convert this mechanical power into electricity. So how do wind turbines make electricity? Simply stated, a wind turbine works the opposite of a fan. Instead of using electricity to make wind, like a fan, wind turbines use wind to make electricity. The wind turns the blades, which spin a shaft, which connects to a generator and makes electricity.

I like to think that such a concept as wind turbines can be seen as the whirligig writ large! Reading your proposal, Steve, and thinking about your new project has attuned me to a new way of thinking about turbine-generated power. For when someone switches on their light in a household powered by electricity from a wind turbine, is not that light a direct result of the activity of wind power in a distant location, harnessed and transferred to your home? Now whilst I realise that this is not the exact purpose of your project, it has shown how your idea and your new work-in-progress has directly led me to look at something that is relatively common in a new and exciting way, which is traditionally the aim of any form of artistic expression worth its name. Your proposal seeks quite beautifully to transpose the soft blowing of a natural breeze in a distant field directly into a city gallery, in real time, through your automated whirligigs. This alone is worth the price of admission, and as an artist I can appreciate the lovingly crafted pieces of folk-art through which you seek to demonstrate your ideas. It is a combination of craft and idea, and the poetic nature of your concept that I really appreciate myself, it is one that speaks to me directly.

To finish, I'd like to quote an anecdote from Rachel Carson's 1961 essay "The Sea Around Us". It concerns the movement of the tides and their effect on a marine worm, the Convoluta roscoffenisis, a creature found in northern Brittany and the Channel Islands. In an abstract way, I think it kind of echoes your experiments with wind automota and shares that aura of the poetic. It highlights the idea of the actions of one distant natural force having a tangible significant effect in another, completely different environment, one that is far away from the original source.

Convoluta has entered into a remarkable partnership with a green alga, who's cells inhabit the body of the worm and lend its tissue their own green colour. The worms have become so dependent upon the plant for means of nutrition that they must enable the algal cells inside them to carry on their function of photosynthesis, which is dependent on sunlight. Therefore, Convoluta rises from the damp sands of the intertidal zone as soon as the tide has ebbed, the sand becoming spotted with large green patches composed of thousands of worms. For several hours while the tide is out, the worms lie thus in the sun, and the plants manufacture their starches and sugars; but when the tide returns, the worms must again sink into the sand to avoid being washed away, out into the deep water. So the whole lifetime of the worm is a succession of movements conditioned by the stages of the tide - upwards into sunshine on the ebb, back downward on the flood.

What I find most unforgettable about Convoluta is this: sometimes it happens that a marine biologist, wishing to study some related problem, will transfer a whole colony of the worms into the laboratory, there to establish them in an aquarium, where there are no tides. But twice a day Convoluta rises out of the sand on the bottom of the aquarium, into the light of the sun. And twice each day it sinks again into the sand. Without a brain, or what we would call a memory, or even any clear perception, Convoluta continues to live out its life in this alien place, remembering, in every fibre of its small green body, the tidal rhythm of the distant sea.

The Artistic Garden

This is a nice little piece by Claudia Brownlie, author of 'The Artistic Garden' offering a bit of historical context to the automata that I'm making reference to in my project...

"Whirligigs, and their cousins – weathervanes - evolved from the very simple and practical wind vanes of ancient times. These wind indicators played an important function for farmers, sailors and anyone else affected by the weather. In researching them, I have not come across the exact date of their "invention", however have found mention to the fact that in the 1440 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary "whyrlegyge" is defined as "any spinning toy".

Who knows who really got the great idea of adding a propeller or pinwheel to a weathervane, however I'll focus on what evolved here in North America with these garden art objects.

There is mention of them being used in early colonial times, solely for their function as a wind determining instrument.

Move forward to the mid-to-late 1880's and references are made to whirligigs appearing in the Appalachian Mountains region. These new folk art objects were made from scrap materials and possibly helped folks while away the idle time they had during the cold winter months. While traditional design themes depicted activities of rural life or common characters, these circa 1880 creations began to be whimsical in nature.

I've found reference made to "old-timers" calling them "comic weathervanes". Comical because the faster the wind blew, the more furiously the poor figures had to move.

There is even mention of whirligigs having the extra "feature" of driving away moles, due to its vibrations. I would be interested in seeing exactly that design of whirligig and how it was mounted that would allow it to accomplish such a useful garden feat. :-)

During the Great Depression of the 1930's, they regained popularity. Farmers were able to make some desperately needed extra money by making and selling them.

Unfortunately, because the materials used were normally not weatherproof, remaining antique specimens are few and far between. You can imagine how these are now coveted by serious folk art collectors. (I recently saw a circa 1930's-40's wooden whirligig up for auction. The figure's hat spun around. The propellers that should have been in each hand were missing; it was only 12" tall; and the asking price was $950.00.)"