Objects for A Heavenly Cave—Lily Clark

Lily clark tends to work with stone and has great sense of proportion and composition that I have been strongly influenced by. Objects for a Heavenly Cave is very unique subtle work that I want to capture some of the spirit of in basin.

Passage to the Lake—Seop Peoseo

Passage to the Lake is a very refined piece that uses a very similar mechanism to what I would need for my work. His piece is based around a peristaltic pump system.

Stone 27— Benjamin Langholz

Stone 27. Ben’s work has a lot of visual impact. I appreciate how he keeps his work focused focused visually and participatory.

• PPM controlled like a servo motor for easy software control

• Custom library and the ability to be calibrated

• Promising design great documentation

• Great I2C interface which making IO management on the Xiao much easier.

• 4 times the cost as the DFR pump.

• Asumming adequate pressure valves like this air valves could have been used. The advantage could be reduced noise.

• Wear on element could be higher than the pumps.

• The change in water pressure could impact accuracy substantially.

• A lot of product differentiation in this space and I don’t know the first thing about these. This cartridge style seems to be common in industrial automation. I have also seen them used on high end large format printers.

• Theoretically could be a major improvement over the simple solenoid valves as these are designed with accurate dosing in mind.

• Price is unknown

The Xiao C3

The Xiao C3 and the C6 were considered because I was familiar with their platforms the xiao C3 ended up be chosen because is a bit more compatible than the C6 which is newer more expensive and had features I did not need.

At a glance

• LINK TO DOCUMENTATION

• Connection type Grove I2C 3.3 or 5V

• vcc = 3.3V or 5V

• Max W = .5 (for 4) = 2 W

Key Specs

• Human Static Presence Detection: up to 6 Meters

• Breathing and Heartbeat Detection: 1.5 Meters

• WS2812 RGB LED (neopixel) onboard

• Sensor will get best reading pointed at chest

1— Initial Diagraming

This is my first attempt at at a scaled down version of my circuit. The final design will probably include 3 pumps and 3 sensors. I am using FigJam to keep track of all of the important specifications for the different devices.

3— Initial CAD for Test Stand

On the left the first design on the right the second. I reworked it around a 2020 extrusion as I realized after I finished the first this was a better approach in every way.

5— Basin Evaluation Board [v.5]

This was my first attempt at an integrated board that could power and run IO for Basin. It had to be scaled down to fit on single layer PCB so only 2 I2C inputs are present instead of the intended 3. The next version will be fully featured and many mistakes will be corrected.

7— v1 Electrical Diagraming

This week I spent the last couple day diagraming researching parts for the two connected PCBs I am designing. More detail on the electronics selection will be added later as a separate section on the website.

9— V1 Board Design in Flux

Getting to this point in with custom component in flux was hard won. This is just a rough layout I am mostly optimizing for legibility and space saving. I will be using a 4 layer PCB so I am not too concerned about routing, but likely things will need to be adjusted.

11—Assembled PCB

When I received the board I did the full component assembly. This was mostly painless, but as expected it took several hours to modify all of the prebuilt cable harnesses for my configuration.

13—Full software integration

I was also pretty careful at this stage this took 2 long days. I worked intentionally slowly breaking the code into discrete sections and confirming they worked before advancing to the next feature. At the very end integrated all of the discrete programs and get the full software prototyped. More details about how I did this can be found here.

15— Photo / Inspiration Collection

I waited and waited to do this part. For me its actually easier to really understand the requirements of a project before I start playing with its form.

17— CAD Print CAD Print CAD Print

Over the course of about 3 weeks I designed the project as several distinct assemblies and at the completion of each assembly I printed it. All in all I had at least a 80 hours of modeling into the project. While I would have liked to design the whole thing then printed I did not have the time. So I printed things as soon as they were ready. The order for this was: lid, Reservoirs, Main chasis pieces, main basin pieces.

19— Main Assembly

Assembly was actually quite straightforward only amounting to about 2 to 3 days of work. Since much time was spent on the front end in CAD I caught I caught many issues in assembly (particularly nailing aluminum leg angles) early on. That said, mistakes were made 5 min epoxy was a bad call the premium Loctite CA glue was plenty strong and far easier to work with.

2— Initial Visual Concept

This was my first concept design for the project.

4— Voltage Conversion Jig

I have thought about creating something like this for a long time. Its just a set of buck converters se to different voltages powered by USB C PD enabling multiple easy to configure testing voltages.

6— Initial Assembly and Dropper Testing

The design was then assembled and tested. The primary things I wanted to test were:

• The optical (caustic) effects I could get by shining a light at the water from different angles.

• If the dropper could reliably drop one droplet with minimal tuning and wether that effect was visually interesting

• The amount of splash at different heights

  

8— V2 Electrical Diagraming

This week I spent a lot of time researching and creating components. This resulted in minor edits to the diagram, but a lot of thought went into double checking components understanding I2C and the overall architecture. Crucially I realized that there was no need to create 2 different PCBs I added some small edits and Bam! I only need one now.

10 — Double sided Milled PCB

I was able to produce my double sided board to test before I sent in my board for production. This was an involved 2 day process. The milled board came out quite well, but I got busy and did not solder the components down. In the interest of time, I decided to pull the trigger on the production version of the board just in case.

12— Full board Test

The full system test took a day. I chose to be very careful and test and document the full board. I really wanted to separate hardware issues from software issues early on this way I would know for sure that the hardware itself was confirmed to work. Otherwise if the hardware had issues (it did) I knew about those issues before I got into the software Dev stage.

14 — Vibe Test

I experimented with many different options as for the dropper pool. I settled for this large cake dish. This was the largest straight wall glass dish I could find. When it arrived I did a quick test dropping water into it manually to see if my expectations matched the reality of how it looked. For the most part I was right, but actually the light created better shadows closer in and not further away from the dish.

16— CAD Concepting

I spent a little more than a day working out just where to start with the project. I knew I was going to have 3 reservoirs and that the project was going to take the form of a circular chasis that was also a junction for the 3 legs. I played around with a tape measure to sort out the constraining dimensions for the design.

18 — CNC

Midway through the CAD design I decided structural plates would be needed to take the load off of some of the primary structure. This was also additional insurance to keep pieces that had bee split up into many separate components to stay joined together.

20—Basin Assembly

I ran into some issues when glueing the 9 basin sections together. I had accidentally reprinted a section and glued sections together in the wrong order. For this reason I am going to force myself to use an a part ID system printed into the parts.