Light Art Practicum at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
I experimented with more colors and found that the best is a rainbow effect, which I arranged in a sort of heat map fashion of red, orange, yellow, green then blue. I overlapped the paper in the back to hopefully blend the colors and create smoother transitions.
Then I decided to add more wax and will show off the final product in tomorrows class.
I cut the acrylic squares:
I put the acrylic squares into the structure. I’m very happy with how snug they fit.
I tested how the LEDs shine through the acrylic. My camera doesn’t capture it very well. It looks much better in person.
Assembling more sides:
Finally assembling the whole cube. The mess of wires was a major challenge.
As of writing this post the cube is fully assembled and working. I plan to save the final reveal for class this Thursday.
Remaining work: continue to write scripts for LED patterns
1: First day working on my project, I ran into problems. First I had to freeze my glass jar in order to make the design on the lid. So I put the glass in the freezer on Monday (4/18). I totally forgot about the jar and on Wednesday I remember it was on the freezer, but it was too late, it was all broken. The picture shown below is when I took it out the freezer.
2: I brought another glass jar and did the first step again, but this time without forgetting that I had it in the freezer. I chose to do a flower design on the lid. Once I had the design, I used engineering paper to copy the design to tape to the lid, so I can start hammering the wholes using a nail. Shown below is the online design and the copied design. Some parts of the lid was harder then others because of the ice, so the only problem I had when hammering is that two nails bent. I was left to use the short nail and kept on hammering my fingers.
3: Here is the final result of the lid when I was finished. Some of the wholes are off, because the paper was really wet and ripping.
Week of April the 4th
I started working on my light art practicum in which i was dripping wax onto a sheet of glass. I started off dripping plain wax onto the glass at different heights to see how it would effect the wax. I found out that the lower the angle to more round the dots where were as the higher the angle the more deformed and splash like they were. I found that the higher angle was the way to go.
After I was done testing the angle effects I decided to add some color wax to make it more interesting and to start covering the whole frame with wax. during the process I turned the frame, held it at different angles and let some wax drip into the same spot to create flows.
This is the final result that I got. The next decision I had to make was how to light it and I originally wanted to back light it with other candles. After I got some larger candles to light it from behind I found they didn’t provide enough light to light the wax. So I ended up using a flashlight to light it from behind and from the front and here are the results of it.
I was not happy with the results because it just didn’t look as cool as i imagined when i first started this process. Also there was a lack of detail, by this I mean there was lack of detail in the multiple layers of wax which I wanted to see. There was one positive that came out of this. I really did like the flows of wax they were the most interesting this about this first attempt. So now i needed to build a structure to hold the glass and candles in a constant position.
Week of April the 11th
I started building the box to hold the glass. I got some nails and cut plywood and tape to hold everything together.
I ended up taping some nails to the top of the frame in order to stick candles on so they cold drip wax in a constant position. I do plan on making it more stable when I have access to power tools when I go home this weekend.
Then I started the process of lighting the candles and making sure that there was a constant stream of wax dripping onto the glass. This meant I had to scrap wax off of the candles to provide a path for the melted wax. Also every couple of minuets I blew the candles out in order to let the wax solidify and for new flow paths to be made. This is what I ended up with.
I was very pleased with the results of this, but I still needed a light source to illuminate the wax because a flashlight was just a temporary solution. Also A major improvement that needs to be made is a whole in the wood behind the frame to allow light through.
Week of April the 16th
I finished improving the box in which the frame will sit on and spray painted it black. I also found a suitable light source because it is an already defused LED light bulb, then I wired all the components together.
I ended up drilling holes into the top of the frame to put nails through that would hold the candles. Then I put nails in the box that would go through the bottom of the frame that would hold it in place.
Then I dripped more wax onto the frame, which I cleared of the old wax. Everything worked amazing and it fit all together and it held the candles perfectly. This is the result.
It turned out amazing and the light provided enough light to really illuminate the details in each layer of wax. Then I planned to continue to drip more wax onto the glass and I needed a diffusing material behind to add more focus onto the wax. While I was doing this my roommates mentioned how it looked like a very relaxing experience so I decided that I should make this an interactive experience for anyone to enjoy. So during the next class meeting I would see if anyone wanted to come and interact with it.
Week of April the 25th
The people that did interact with my Interactive wax said the same things my roommates said, which is that it is a very relaxing experience and I would agree because throughout the process I was never stressed and looked forward to working on it. I also really enjoy how the sculpture changes over time with more wax added and wax falling off because part become brittle.
I finally got some diffusing material (tissue wrapping paper) to light the sculpture and this is what I got.
This is defiantly better than what I imagined when I first started the project so I am very pleased with how this came out. I plan to do different colors and mix colors and add more wax.
Since the last update, I have made significant progress. I have assembled a frame to hold the motor and axle in place. Below is a picture of this:
The following picture shows the assembled cylinder, and gears at the bottom of the image. The wooden pieces firmly hold the gears, which have a 1 to 5 ratio, together. The gears will enable the motor to spin the axle to rotate the cylinder. The cylinder consists of the 3D printed discs, 24 cut acrylic rods, and nails to hold the rods in place in the upper disc. The tape around the upper disc will temporarily hold in the nails.
Below is a close up picture of the LED ring and the rods extending out from it while it is emitting light.
Since I last posted, I’ve made a lot of progress.
I have 3d printed the remaining sides of the cubes. And installed LEDs into all of them. The following are pictures of that process.
I have received the acrylic that I will use to diffuse the LEDs. I have scheduled a time to meet with someone to discuss using the WPI’s laser cutter.
Moving forward I need to actually get the acrylic cut and then I will be ready to finally assemble the cube.
I finally got all the parts for the el wire so I started to wrap them around the skeleton. The wire was harder to work with than I thought . When daisy-chaining different colors the tiny corona wires often broke which was frustrating. The heat shrink tubing worked really well at blocking out the wire and cleaning up my splicing. I used hot glue to affix the wire and although it was mess it worked well will getting tight curves. The sound reactive box work well with songs with strong beats.
After buying all the items I need for the project, I started working on getting the software part of the project working. As outlined in the Project Proposal, the first step was getting Processing to output the FFT spectrum of a playing music track on my laptop. There were a lot of helpful tutorials online and they helped me get the real-time FFT data of the song/microphone input. After, looking around what others have done for Arduino-Processing Spectrum Analyzer projects, I realized that the highest frequency content of the spectrum is about 5kHz for most songs instead of the full human hearing range of up to 20kHz. Therefore, I divided the frequencies from 0 to 5.6kHz into six frequency bins in Processing as shown below.
The frequency bin heights were limited from 0 – 255 to be compatible with the Arduino PWM write function. Different scale factors were used for the human voice bin and the low frequency treble bin since they were pretty small compared to the bass height. A real-time visualization of the FFT spectrum can also be plotted on Processing. 
Now that these frequency array values are ranging from 0 to 255, I sent them to Arduino using a for loop. Before each iteration of sending data, 0xFF was sent first for synchronization purposes. In Arduino, the code was written so that Arduino starts reading data by byte once 0xFF was recieved through the serial port. Equal for loop delay of 5ms and main loop delay of 10ms were added in both Processing and Arduino scripts to further ensure the data transfer synchronization. It was confirmed that the data transfer between Arduino and Processing was synchronized by sending constant input from Processing and observing the same output at Arduino.
Now that the software part of the project is mostly done, I started working on the hardware part, which is the vibration motor matrix and how the motors come together with the sphere magnets and the petri-dish containing ferrofluid. Using cardboard boxes, I tried to make a fixture for the motor matrix. Little did I know was that there is a considerable attraction between the ferrofluid and the magnets as well as the motors, which means that the plan to vibrate the sphere magnets to change the magnetic field is not gonna work since everything is sticking to one another…
So I thought about changing the magnetic field without having any moving parts, which leads me to the idea of using electromagnets instead of permanent magnets. Having spent about 35 dollars on the sphere magnets and vibration motors, all of which have become useless now, I was actually hesitant on buying new materials, so I went ahead and bought six of these small and cheap electromagnet brakes from Amazon shown below with two day shipping.
It turns out that the magnetic field they produce is too small and nothing but a small bump appears on the ferrofluid when they are powered. Another 27 dollars was wasted…
At this point, I was pretty disappointed because I have spent so much money and nothing really seemed to be working as I expected. I knew I needed a strong electromagnet but I have no idea how strong and how much money I should be spending. I saw some Youtube videos testing some lift electromagnets and thought I should give it a try. So I purchased three of the 12V 5.6lbs lift electromagnets from Amazon with two-day shipping.
By using a transistor and a 12V power supply from AK227 lab, I was able to control the strength of the electromagnet with Arduino. With only ferrofluid in the petri-dish, the movement of the ferrofluid due to the changing magnetic field strength from the electromagnet looks like this following video (It’s not my experiment, I forgot to document this phase). Instead of the spikes as in the case with a strong rare earth metal, a rather large bump was witnessed even when the electromagnet is at full power (12V, 0.25A).
At this point, I was quite happy with the results since I can see the change in the magnetic field with the incoming music FFT data. But I was not quite satisfied because I thought I was gonna see the spikes with this electromagnet since it is relatively strong. Also, I know that without the spikes, I would not see the cool patterns even when I put the glow material into the ferrofluid.
I did more research online looking for an explanation of why I am getting just a bump and not spikes with the electromagnet but to no avail. Then, somewhere on the Amazon website, I also saw this ferrofluid suspension in a bottle filled with water-like liquid. At this point, my plan has changed from hunting for the ferrofluid spikes to just creating a cool visual by turning on one electromagnet of the three I have at a time and make the ferrofluid chase the electromagnet that is turned on. The light art aspect of this idea would be to just use a RGB led to light up the water-like fluid part with incoming music data.
So I did more research about what that water-like fluid is, and it turned out to be 70% isopropyl alcohol. I have a bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol sitting in the bathroom closet so I tried with that but it does not seem to work as the ferrofluid just sinks to the bottom and smears all over the container as I drag the magnet around it. So, I took a quick trip to the local CVS and bought one of the 70% isopropyl rubbing alcohol and it worked. Then, I tested it with the electromagnets that I bought and little did I know that it would also form spikes when the electromagnets are powered on. I hooked the experiment up with my laptop and Arduino and start playing songs with really nice beats. The results are below…
This first one is with all three electromagnets being driven with the bass FFT data.
The following ones are made with bass, voice, and low frequency treble data. Can you tell which one is which?
I know it is hard to see because it is clear, but the 70% sopropyl rubbing alcohol is in the cup. Also, I used a plastic cup because I did not have a glass petri dish.
So once again, and I hope this is the last time, I went onto Amazon and bought three more of the same electromagnets that I already have and 5 glass petri-dishes and a jar of glow paint since getting the glow material out of the glow sticks is extremely messy and difficult.
At this point, I think the majority, or at least the hard part, of this project has been accomplished and I have spent $193 with about $60 spent on items that are not gonna be used at all. Looking forward, I will include the Light Art aspect into it by first using the glow paint with the 70% isopropyl rubbing alcohol. I am not sure if that is even gonna work since it’s not really mixing the paint with water but if it did not, I will use an RGB led and light the glass petri-dish from the bottom and have the RGB led change color with the music.
Here is also a picture of the setup in AK227 lab. For the project demonstration, I will have to borrow a 12V power supply in order to power up the six power-hungry electromagnets.
This week the progress made was primarily in the parts acquisition and general planning stage.
I purchased most of the parts I will need for this project. Following is the screen grab from the receipt. This is the list from Sparkfun
This is the list from Amazon:
In addition to purchasing the parts for the project, I also CADed out the main armatures for the project. The following is the preliminary draft. These will be altered now that I posses the parts. I can take more detailed measurements and create better fitments. The first piece is the inner armature that holds the LED armature. It sits inside the second piece. The second piece spins as well.
Progress Report 2
My LEDs arrived, and I wired them up on my breadboard I used three 1.5V batteries in series (4.5V) as the power supply. I used a battery holder taken from a flashlight. I was initially confused that each LED had four pins, but apparently each pin is connected to one other pin such that there are effectively two pins. I wired the LEDs in parallel, giving each one a current limiting resistor. This resistance was chosen so that the LED current would be the nominal value of 20mA. The forward bias voltage is 3.2V, so R=(V Battery – V LED)/ i LED = (4.5-3.2)/20E-3 = 65Ω. I didn’t have 65Ω so I used 100Ω and 200Ω in parallel for 66.67Ω.
I also made a rough test setup to see if shadows would be actually 3D. I just used books and a box to hold up the paper. I tested the following transparent items: Tupperware lid, eye glasses, safety glasses, drinking glass, empty clear tape dispenser, clear ruler, plastic bottle. The results were spectacular! It worked just as I thought, and the orientation of the objects was mirrored across the page as predicted, meaning that the part of the furthest part of the real object is the closest part of the virtual object.
I took some pictures to see if they would still be as 3D when viewed on the computer. Unfortunately, either the camera or the screen shifted the color slightly so that you can see a little bit of the red image through the red lens, which you are not supposed to. So, the effect is best when seen in person because the second pair of 3D glasses is filtering the light sources to exactly the right colors.
I bought an 18” x 24” x 0.9” sheet of Plexiglas from the nearby Home Depot. I cut it by scoring it with a straightedge and razor blade and breaking it over the edge of the table. This worked except for one of the sides, which cracked in half. I think the problem was that the walls are so short so there is less leverage and a lot of force is required, and it is harder to keep the force evenly distributed. I am hoping to put this wall back together with the solvent glue.
On the framing front, I remembered seeing a reusable shelving system in our basement. It was a metal frame that could be assembled many ways and used to slide wooden shelves into. My parents were coming up for the weekend so I asked if they still had it and if they could put into the trunk. It was just the right size.
