The president of the University of Colorado came to the Craft Technology Lab today, so everyone’s been working hard over the past week to get a short demo together. The not-enough-sleep feeling is not so good, but I did manage to get a bit done on the first version of the UCUbe. Not so sure how much the president understood, but my advisor seemed pretty impressed (which is no small feat).
Here are a few pics of the development and UCube v.01:
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- Laser cutting the base board
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- Custom laser etching
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- Iterations – at least 13 of them
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- Improved breadboarding
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- From beneath
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- In action
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- UCUbe software screenshot
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- PS2 Disc Drive
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- PS2 Disc Drive
Those last two are pics of me taking apart my PS2 in order to try and fix the disc drive (won’t open or close properly).
It looks like I’ll be giving an Arduino workshop next week to a bunch of MFA students here at CU. Should be fun. I also have a few exciting collaborations in their early stages – one involving a home-economics lab and the other involving GPS tracking of art pieces. More soon.
So what is the president’s name? What did he say? Did you shake hands with him? Were you wearing your secret hand-shake electric buzzer? What’s not to understand? It for hamsters, right?
Bruce Benson. He said, “Bah. Humbug.” But in a very encouraging way. I did shake hands with him, but I forgot the buzzer. In all honesty, he seemed to think it was interesting, but it was very brief demo, so who knows for sure. He didn’t make any disparaging comments anyway.
Seriously, what is it supposed to do? What is supposed to help folks understand?
It’s a system for modeling shapes/objects in three dimensions. Each button can be thought of as a point in space, an (x,y,z) coordinate. By flipping the switch, you are ‘activating’ the point, and making it a vertex of the 3d object you wish to model. The software allows you to see the shape you’re modeling and export a file that you can send to a 3d printer – taking you from interactive modeling in 3-space to an actual physical object, without the use of complex software. There are also a fair number of possible cognitive science applications, as well as educational exercises with 3d geometry, spatial reasoning, etc. I’ll post a video when it’s fully functional.
Wow! You really do amaze me. Never saw this one coming (you probably didn’t either). Very proud of you.
D.
p.s. Does the UCube make sounds? Be interesting to see if by rotating the cube as it emits sound, if a sight-impaired or blindfolded person could tell its shape. If so, that could be a PhD topic….