Format: DIN A6 280g/cm2 for the ticket, DIN A5 80g/cm2 for the envelope.

Take a pice of plywood, cut out a pattern along the curve you want to shape and apply some hot water to the outside face of the bend, et voila. The cuts weaken the integrity of the material making it able to bend without snapping. Well, I tried some more patterns…

For the transmitter case I tried dashed patterns. Unfortunatly the cuts were too far apart. The bend was under a lot of stress. I decreased the spread and it now bends very well.

pliability: very good
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: good
normal strength: very good

This is a herringbone pattern. It does work quite well. I underestimated the waste of the laser so the pattern breaks in some areas.

pliability: good
tensile strength: very good
torsonal strength: very good
normal strength: very good

Here is a good old midevil cross pattern. It’s a little hard to bend but once it’s in place it holds up nice.

pliability: fair
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: fair
normal strength: good

This is the diagonal cross pattern. I would’t reconment using it. It bends really hard and breaks very easy. The biggest problem is, it doesn’t evenly bend due to its diagonal grid.

pliability: very poor
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: fair
normal strength: good

Here is my favourite one made out of a few rows of space invaders. It is very delicate but in the end it does bend.

pliability: fair
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: poor
normal strength: poor

You can actually use whatever pattern you like as long as the pattern isn’t diagonal to the bend. Just tinker around a little. It all works to some extend. The problem with these tests is definetly the size of the bend. The radius is only 8 mm. The space invaders are a little too small for the laser I used. I could see this being awesome in a bigger scale.

If you want to try it yourself here’s the CAD file.

Take an mp3 player, a UKW sending unit and a battery, put it into a snug little box and you have a portable FM radio station.

Lets start with the case.
I took the dimensions of all the parts that I needed to fit into the case. Namely one mp3 player, a 9V Battery and the transmitter. After I digitally arranged the components to my liking, I figured the size of the top and bottom piece of the case. I decided to go with round corners. A kerf bend allowed me to manufacture the side faces out of one piece, by making the material flexible where it needed to be.

I placed some holes to the one of the smaller sides of the box. This gives me access to the mp3 players on/off switch and the USB port. I also cut out a piece for the on/off switch of the transmitter.

I went to the workshop and used a laser to cut out all pieces according to my plans. I also cut out two frames with the outer diameter of the box. These helped me holding everything in place while gluing the bottom piece to the side face. If the side won’t really bend well, try wetting the outer side of the bends with water.

Attached to the top piece is a frame corresponding to the inner diameter of the box granting easy access to the box while holding the top on tight. I also cut out a little logo that I replaced with an equivalent out of opaque plexi glass.

The transmitter I used is the UKW-Oszillator B018. The possession or use of the transmitter might be regulated by law in your country. For me, I only need this to be a proof of concept. I left the sending unit unfunctional by not adding a coil to the circuit. After soldering everything else together, I added a power switch between battery and transmitter. I hooked up an indicator LED parallel to the sending unit.

So there you have it. A neatly encased, portable radio station. Whether you use it for a silent rave, for geocaching or to listen to your music while sitting in the garden, it really is up to you.

What I plan to with this, well that’s another story, for the next post…

This article helped me with the design.

raumgeflüster

Oft bewegen wir uns durch Räume, dessen Existenz wir mal mehr, mal weniger bewusst wahrnehmen, deren Identität uns aber verschlossen bleibt. Wenn wir durch eine Stadt gehen, geben wir anhand von eigenen Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen verschiedensten Orten eine gewisse Bedeutung. Die Wahrnehmung eines Ortes ist also geprägt von persönlichen Erlebnissen und Emotionen und ist somit von unserer Voreingenommenheit bestimmt.

Zu einem Raum gehören viele Geschichten. Jede Erzählung von Anderen über die Erlebnisse an einem bestimmten Ort, hilft uns dabei, abseits unserer Voreingenommenheit den Raum in seiner Vielschichtigkeit zu begreifen.

Mit einem Mikrofon nehme ich Gedanken, Empfindungen oder Erlebnisse unterschiedlicher Personen zu bestimmten Orten auf. Danach packe ich die Monologe auf einen mp3 player, welcher mit einem UKW Sender ausgestattet und an einer 9V Block Batterie angeschlossen ist. Die Technik wird in ein Gehäuse gebaut und an den entsprechenden Orten aus den Erzählungen hinterlassen.

Jeder mit einem kleinen Taschenradio kann nun durch die Stadt wandern, sich auf eine Reise begeben, entlang des Horizontes anderer Menschen. Sich erfreuen und erstaunen and den Öberflächlichkeiten und Kuriositäten der annonymen Stimmen.
Er kann seine Sicht auf die Architekturen der Stadt überdenken und wird bald verstehen, dass es nicht nur eine, die eigene Sichtweise der Realität gibt.

We got some items from the website and put them into plexiglass bubbles. Each bubble has a tag stating name of the item, owner, describtion and story, just like on swopspot.net. Additionally there is a QR code linking to the regarding object on the website.

Hanging from the ceiling the items appear to be floating in midair. Visitors wonder how the objects are related to each other or if there is a deeper meaning to all of this. Equipped with a tablet, we approach the viewer, scan the item they seem to be interested in and show a live demo of our website.

The feedback was amazing, for the exhibition and for swopspot… Looks like we’ll get some more people joining us soon.

Bernd posted some more pictures on the whole story over on the maschinenraum blog

Just put in one euro and you’ll get a link to a wallet with the corresponding amount of bitcoins in it. Use of the torwallet will be available soon.

Sorry for the hipster pictures below… Due to the crappy nature of my mobile devices’ camera it’s not possible to record decent regular pictures.

UPDATE:
Easywallet now supports coupons that give out bitcoins corresponding to the actual exchange rate as you scan the code… Thanks to max.

Max blogged a post as well, over at maschinenraum.tk

On swopspot you can trade anything. One hour of gardening for a dinner, old CDs for new books, handmade items for useless things. Just add stuff you want to trade away to your profile and wait for someone to make an offer to you. Or you browse around, see what your neighbors are willing to give away and make them an offer.

Swopspot enables you to trade locally. You save on packaging and delivering because in the best case you just meet for a coffee to finalize the trade. Giving the environment a fair share as well.

Poster din A1: neudeli is the start-up workshop at the Bauhaus University Weimar. neudeli aims to support creative, inventive and doers who want to build an independent existence for themselves. They have helped lots of students from the bauhaus university to archive their goals.

Due to the fairly common misconception of what seo is and how it works, they booted my site and replaced it with wordpress…

This example is based on an office building with a variable amount of employees. Through the number of employees we are able to calculate the needed size of the room structures which are then displayed as circles with a diameter corresponding to their calculated area. These circles are in fact bounding boxes since the structures aren’t supposed to overlap each other. Between the areas that need a direct connection springs are applied. These springs each having a specific force try to attract the room structures that are connected to each other minimizing the walking distance between them. Rooms that need to be close to each other but don’t necessarily need a direct connection are able to attract themselves as well. Other areas that need a certain distance between them will repel.

The wohle program is based on the “generative design library” that adds certain features to the “processing” environment enabling me to easily implement a force directed layout into the machine by supplying basic objects for physical simulations. Rooms are described in nodes. Each node has different values such as position, size and strength. The strength determines the gravitational force between the nodes and can either create attraction or repulsion. The springs are actually elastic connections between two nodes. They differ in length, stiffness and damping. Spring and nodeforces usually antagonize each other to some degree.

Wanting to be able to influence how the forces interact with each other I chose to set up a gui, that gives you basic control over some of the values stated above. When you click and drag one of the nodes it will move along your mouse, giving you the opportunity to rearrange the whole layout of the building.

Once you have found a valid solution for the layout you can apply a simple tessellation in order to get the actual structure inside the building. For now I used the voronoi function to generate the rooms around the nodes. Although this rather popular method seems to go along with the idea of this program and is fairly easy to implement it doesn’t really fit all the needs. The voronoi function usually generates acute angles to some amount and that is probably something you don’t really want to see in a floor plan.

In the next step you are able to generate a patio that provides access to the rooms. A  set of subnodes is connected to the nodes with springs. You can control gravitation or repulsion of the subnodes as well es the springs length, stiffness and the radius of the area around the subnodes in which the forces are applied.

In the last step everything is graphically bled together revealing the final structure of the building.

I implemented a simple way to save and load your settings, enabling you to discover more options as soon as you found a perfect mix of forces. Another thing to consider is the size and shape of the property in which the building is supposed to be located at. The property acts as a kind of bounding box so that none of the nodes lie outside of the building area.

Well, enough theory for now. Go ahead and try for yourself. (zip 3MB, mac, linux, win)

A big “thank you” goes out to pomax and jestermax at irc.freenode.org #processing for helping me with the load/save function.