Busy evening..  after a really full day at work, left work around 5 for an unplanned trip to Homer’s to reprogram the delay units I’d made for his mechanized metal paintings .  I’d finished them last night.. fried all three of them with a bad power supply early this morning, rebuilt them.. homer picked them up at my house before work .. only to find that I’d miscoded the delays by a factor of ten (3 seconds where homer wanted 30).. Rather than dictating the code changes by phone.. I fugured it was easier for us both for me just to drive there and back (50 miles) for 3 minutes of code update.. not necessarily efficient.. but artists need to suffer.. don’t they ?

here’s one of my delay elements winking at me…

here’s homer getting ready to wire them in..

These photos don’t do the metal paintings justice.. they’re really beautiful.. you should come down to the Flynndog gallery on Friday for the opening and see them.

 

I got home a bit late… friend Seth was already at the house waiting for me with his friend Vinnie from work. They’re both Interns at Microstrain. Seth has been working with me since he was in high school.. he’s a very good electronics hacker…

Diane had made a delicious fish taco dinner.. so we all dug in.. just  as we finished, my buddy John showed up.. he’s working with me on a music project i’m very excited about.. the four of us spent a few great hours geeking out..and talking shop . I managed to con Seth and Vinnie to help me figure out the last component of the  smoke machine setup for friend   Chris’s  Steampunk jetpack at the Fylnndog . Te challenge was to add a circuit that determined if the smoke machine as up to temperature to prevent misfires… the challenge was the crcuit had to be completely electrically isolated from the cheaply made smoke machine to prevent an electrical disaster (like the on I caused wiht smoke machine number 1.. ugh) .After a little fiddling we all came up with a great scheme: we taped (yes taped) a CdS (cadmium sulfide) photocell to the stupid light up switch on the unit. which shifts resistance when the ready light is either off or on.. Voila ! The lab was full of smoke.. just as it was supposed to be !

 

I really want to encourage you all to check out Homer , Chris and their freind Ethan in their Flyndogg show which opens this Friday night.. Should be very cool. I’ll post info about it here and in FB..

for now.. must sleep..

nite all, nite sam

-me