Needs More Time – a somatic time piece
This past week, for the class Time, our assignment was to create a time piece based on or measuring one of the various bodily cycles: digestion, hair growth, skin renewal, menstruation, etc.
As always, my viscera nudged me into a clean concept suffused with humor. I immediately thought of a nondescript box with one long, heavy flagellum rising out of the top, flopping over from its weight, and slowly inching forward in conjunction to one’s own rate of growth. It’s hair.
I had a simple idea with a theoretically simple execution. The internal mechanisms would work as follows: material would be gathered or spooled at the bottom and filtered up through a hole in an upper floor; the “hair” would funnel through into a tube to keep the “hair” straight as it entered the motor and gears, one driven by the motor and one freewheel, propelled upwards by the direction of the motor and the friction created by the pressure of both wheels on the “hair”; finally the hair would break the surface of the wooden box. All powered simply by an Arduino module and a 9V battery.
Building the box was fairly easy with most of the time devoted to precise measurements and crafty ways of building levels and removable parts.
I figured the mechanism would be easy enough to build. So I built it using a small dc motor and some of its stock gears. I divided the mounting hardware to accommodate both gears (inelegant I know) and glued rubber bands to them so they would have more traction. Then I wired up an Arduino, or actually, a Seeeduino (cheaper knockoff straight from China) using the dc motor lab as a guide.
Now it was time for testing! My original intent as described above, was to use a bulky, cumbersome material for the hair. I searched the premises and came up with a power cable from a computer monitor. It was thick, cylindrical, and heavy. Seemed like the perfect fit. However, I soon found out that my little motor was not strong enough to propel the cable upward. OK. At this point, class was a day away and I figured, “This should at least be functioning for class.”
So I temporarily sidelined the cable and thought yarn would do the trick. It has hair-like qualities: soft, flimsy, stringy. It didn’t have the same comic effect of the cable, but I had spent too much time building and not testing that I had to abandon something.
Who would have thought? The yarn was too light! Instead of extruding out of the hole, it gathered below it! No doubt due in some part to the roughed wooden hole I had made, but I somehow think that even with a smoother exit, the yarn would still have trouble retaining shape long enough to slip out. Bummer! At this point, class was a few hours away and I had a non functioning piece that I had worked pretty hard on.
I frantically perused the production lab to find a suitable material. I then spotted some black heat-shrink for binding wires together; it was flimsy but sturdy. Seemed perfect for my current predicament. Testing it proved a tad difficult. While the material worked in all ways I needed, the motor needed to be tweaked for placement and motor speed. I must have reset the motor placement over a dozen times, and I’d like to thank my partner and deus ex machina for this project – Señor Super Glue.
I set the motor speed at various levels, from 255 down to 40. None worked all that well. So I left it at full blast, thinking I could get some movement (I was actually altering the motor and recoding these things all the way up to presentation time- an hour and a half into class!
I had something, and now just needed to delay the movement of the motor concomitantly, the hair, by adding a delay to the function. I entertained using millis() but savior-in-resident Chris informed that if nothing else was happening in my Arduino script, that delay was the easy option. I easily agreed.
Quick Final Thoughts
I loved the project and believe I will be working on it some more. Probably to render the follicle a little more, finesse the mechanism, and find a suitable hair material that is collapsible but retains shape. Hollow foam maybe? Either way, ye have not seen the last of it!
