The Garden- Final Project
The Garden- Definition
Well, the garden is a representation of a natural ecosystem, using sensors, internet interface and
the ordering of flowers in the garden, each represents an input and an ooutput wich influences the system ando always offers
a differente result. The base of this work is the influence of the not natural elements (man, construcctions, etc.)
around the system and depending on their order and intensity can determine a positive or negative result.
What me inspired this?
Well, this project it's inspired in Fluoralife You can see the video
Summary of this Project
Fluoralife is a customizable, growing and interactive garden of Kinetic objects.
The Miniflo's (or mini-flowers) are designed by the user who can select from a "candy shop" of parts. The user can also
select a Moflo (or mother flower) to plug their creation into. Depending on which Moflo they choose, their Miniflo will
respond to different actions of Light, Sound or Movement. The result is a garden that changes over time, educates students
about inputs and outputs, reacts and emerges behavior and aims to make workspaces more playful. The garden as an open concept
can be applied to many workspace scenarios and by extension, used as indicators for various workspace interactions.
How it function?
An Internet user sends signals that interact with the garden that is always connected to the Internet,
each of the flowers has an analog sensor
Also depending on the arrangement of flowers, you get different results
How to Build?
You have two components:
---Internet Interface
---Construction the flowers
---Electronics connections
Internet Interface
It is necessary to make the serial connection, to do this we use the following files, download
here. You can see files: interface.html, interface.php and phpserial.class.
All configuration is done by Ubuntu, you can see the interface installed in my web in the following link
Construction the flowers
I build 8 hexagonal cells joined by press-fit, At first consideration is to the material, MDF use which
is not uniform throughout its length, therefore it works with an average, in my case 12.5mm, determined this thickness,
the design is reduced by 0.1 mm being the final thickness of 12.4mm. Always work in SolidWorks, although I am slowly trying
new processes, a here are the views and the final result:
Back to 3D modeling in Solidworks, DXF file export each, DXF for working this time I decided to use something new, use DraftSight Its environment is very friendly, is opensource, and can open files dwg, dxf, and that is where do the ordering of my pieces, the image on the left side are the junctions, with an inclination of 60° and takes place in another layer (red)
For Shopbot used two types of mills, one for the 60 ° and the other for the cuts of 90 °, These cuts of 90 ° made with 3mm diameter mill, because in preliminary tests of 6mm kept a good finish. You see resulted the end the following::
I used Solidwork for the design of flowers, it manufactured with 3mm and 5mm acrylic in the laser machine, and used for connections flexible copper, placing a sensor and a LED on each petal
Electronics Connections
I tried to do the project with the Fab-duino, which has a variation made by Cristian Cisneros, and is called X-duino here
can see the construction, however it did not work very well, so I used Arduino
There are still some problems to solve, such as connections to the server, I hope can resolve it soon
Thank you very much Diego and Juan Carlos