W1: Principles and Practices

Setting Up

I'm on a rather fresh installation of macOS Catalina, so the first thing to do was to generate an SSH key and set up git.

Generating an SSH key

I just followed the very simple tutorial on Gitlab's Docs. It will guide you through generating the key pair and uploading it to Gitlab's SSH keys section in your profile:

Now wer're ready to set up git to clone the repo locally and begin adding to it and uploading back to Gitlab.

Setting Up git

The git community has a nice tutorial on their official website.

On macOS, typing 'git' on Terminal will prompt you to install the Command Line Developer Tools automatically.

Once the key is uploaded and we've got git running locally, we just clone the remote repository from GitLab:

Designing and coding the website

I wanted to try a different template than the default, with less clicking to move back and forth between assignments.

There are many, many good text editors out there, some are free like Atom or paid like Sublime Text. I settled on Visual Studio Code because it's free, extensible, multiplatform and well supported.

I also wanted to experiment with something different than good old HTML, so I'm going to be trying out Pug and Stylus. Both allow for some utilities and simplified coding. I'll be compiling these to HTML with CodeKit.

Publishing to FabCloud

FabCloud can make your repo into a website if you isntruct them how to build it after every commit is pushed.

In my case it's just simple HTML so there isn't much to do.

Once some code is written, it's a matter of commitinng the changes and pushing back to FabCloud:

It may take a bit to update the published website.

Other tidbits

I've also made a little Automator workflow to process images for publication, reducing their size and converting them to jpg:

Here we can see it in action in Finder

The new Final Project

With the pandemic still ongoing, I've found myself in from March to November (and counting) with very limited access to the Fab Lab, so in accordance with my mentor, we've decided to take a different approach to how I thought the Fab Academy would unfold. To that extent, we've come up with a new final project that will make the most of the assignments, specially using the Mechanical and Machine Design as part of it, also considering that I'm a single student.

Background

Light-painting is an art form which consists on taking pictures of moving light, capturing the traces as it moves in space. I've been doing light-painting photogrpah for a while, in a very rudimentary and amateur way.

This is my set up: a dark background in a closet. This is actually the same room and spot from which I've had to connect sometimes throughout the pandemic confinement!

And these are the lights I've used: kids toys and a laser pointer.

These are just a couple of shots with this set up:

Other projects

I've seen there have been some other projects around light painting in Fab Academy. For example this one made during Fab Academy 2017 by Ana Cabral, Ola Mirecka and Birkir Thor:

Or this one, which is somewhat similar:

What I'm thinking of is something different, though.

Project Overview

For this project, I'm looking to create a machine that does something similar to another shot of mine, albeit in a more portable studio with more interesting possibilities.

In short, the idea is to make a closed box with moving lights that create pseudo-random light-paintings via long exposure shots.

The box will be completely black inside, and has a few small opening for a mobile camera phone to see thorugh. The faces will be covered in velcro to allow for easy attachment.

Inside, concentric circles with LEDs will spin and their traces will be captured. Both LED behaviour and some aspects of the movement can be programmed and/or controlled.

Each circle could have up to four LEDs, as seen in the cross-section below, although that's probably not necessary to creat interesting effects, and could be a power consumption hurdle.

The movement behaviour should be something similar to this example:

So, ideally, we would have a step motor at the base, controlling the outer circle's rotation, and the one nested inside would spin freely.

Some thought has been given to easier, linear approaches, but the results are different, closer to the examples shown above from previous years:

Previously, in a pre-pandemic life...

(These were my original thoughts about the final project, but in light of the pandemic and associated restrictions, we thought it lacked focus and "tightness". I will have to follow up on this later on :)

I approach Fab Academy as a means to prototype as many ideas as I can around around the theme presented below., as well as aqcuiring new skills to flesh them out beyond the notebook.

To that extent, I foresee the final project taking shape as we advance through the program and I see how the learnings can be applied to my interests, by then doing self-contained micro-projects for each assignment. It's a somewhat similar approach to the one described in picture below (don't know who to credit it to!)

Similar to the process described above, there's an underlying theme that connects all products, but these are actually all different, not necessarily part of a bigger project.

Final project ideas

I have a number of ideas around the creation and manipulation of music: instruments, effects (re-parametrizers, as a good friend liked to call them :), accesories and devices in general that enable new ways of approaching music composition and performance.

In particular, I'm interested in moving forward the expresiveness available to the performer in now-classic instruments, like electric guitars, which haven't really changed much since their original concept, as well as bringing HCD and HCI approaches to the design and development of modern computational musical devices.

Moreover, I'm particularly interested in moving my skills from one-off, handmade products to semi-industrial, machine-made products. I find that some of my ideas require a precision that is hard to achieve and/or replicate by hand