Between being in Japan and moving in to a new place and out of my old apartment, I haven’t had many updates. I’ve been making progress at the GoMA (Garage of Modern Art — what we call Jesse’s garage).
Construction of the final case has started –

I’ll be painting the interior walls a dark color so that you see it through the lexan’s clear material — hoping to get a sleek look.
Since being back, I’ve reconsidered the main sensor I’ll use to capture the wind. Until now, I had been working with an accelerometer with a rotating fan-like construction to spin in the wind. While it’s neat that I was able to create a free rotating circuit and use it with an accelerometer, it lost some of the “wind chime” feeling I originally described. When someone referred to it as a windmill, I knew the rotating idea wasn’t the right fit. It might still make it in as a secondary input, but right now I’m putting my focus on a much simpler way to catch wind.

Prototype of new method of catching wind
This method has a conductive shaft that swings in the wind (you can see the wire going down the hole in the prototype picture — there’s a piece of plastic taped to the wire to catch the wind), and a conductive ring for the shaft to make contact with (in the prototype, this is the foil) — if it swings too far, the metals touch and complete the circuit. It’s a very simple concept. After doing the quick proof of concept version, I started designing the final. I decided I’d like a plastic box to build it inside. I was about to go to radio shack to get a few small project boxes when Jesse reminded me he had the vacuum form setup — this was the first time we got to use it.

Here you see the vacuum table (like a reverse air hockey table) and the foam molds I made. The process involves heating the plastic sheet until it is sagging and very flexible like cloth — you then turn on the vacuum table and press the plastic sheet onto the top of the object you’re casting.


Here is the result — not perfectly flush with the bottom corners, but good enough for my application.

I’ll be drilling a hole into the top of these and they will replace the double wire harness you see in the proof of concept version posted earlier.














