small quick pallet animal for Hackney Wicked Festival

This is a thermoelectric  lantern using energy from one tea-light candle to power  6 high brightness LED fireflies who cluster round the flame. The combined light output of the LEDs is about 100 times more than the light output of the candle.

It’s constructed using a chip from an old 12v fridge, which normally uses electricity to create a temperature difference across its two faces. In a fridge, one side of this chip is kept at room temperature, and therefore the other side becomes colder.

In this project, we run this effect in reverse, heating one side of the chip with a candle, and allowing the other side to cool with a heatsink from an old Dell computer. So we generate small voltage which we then amplify to power the LEDs.

The lamp is made from an antique Chinese-made oil lamp. The oil fill valve on the back of the lamp has been converted into the control switch with 3 modes – FIREFLIES – OFF – HI-BEAM.

The movement of the Sun, Moon and Earth create the most fundamental rhythms for life on Earth. In modern city life, we live to different, man-made rhythms – the weekend, Christmas, or  the last friday (payday!) of an arbitrary, non-lunar month. It’s even difficult to find natural calendars – city lights mean that the effect of the moon’s light is often unnoticed, light pollution blocks stars, and our line of sight to horizons is often blocked by the city skyline.

Urban henge v1: Equinox is a street art version of a neolithic calender which indicates the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox from the Sun’s position. A small discreet mirror is positioned so that at precisely 12:00 noon on each equinox, and on only these 2 special days, the sun is reflected exactly onto the trilithon (stones).

Temporosaurus is constructed from unwanted forklift pallets. These pallets are temporarily rearranged to give life to a creature of myth – a tyrannosaur – whose purpose is to be ritually burned. From the audience perspective, the fire marks the start of the creature’s life, but as soon as it is lit and becomes alive, it is also simultaneously dying as the flames consume it. So it illustrates that to die beautifully whilst giving warmth and light to others is also to live fully.

Photography by Lucy Tanner

Escape by Anthony Goh and Neil Mendoza from Neil Mendoza on Vimeo.

Birds [Objects] by Neil Mendoza from CreativeApplications.Net on Vimeo.

This weekend at the V&A, there are a bunch of workshops, events, art and joining-in stuff that celebrate digital art and design. Me and Neil will be there all day Saturday and Sunday with some robotic birds constructed out of mobile phones so pop down and say hi if you’re around. We will be talking to anyone who listens about microcontrollers and hardware hacking(!) aka the language of love.

Mobile phone birds in construction phase

It’s all free. Other highlights include light graffiti workshops, Hidden V&A iPod tours, and toy hacking. Full programme here:
Digital Design Weekend at the V&A on 25&26th September

Me and Neil have been working hard in the shed for a couple of weeks building a Haunted Typewriter. It’s a 90 year old typewriter which we have painstakingly totally automated, brought to life and given senses and personality, via a microcontroller, 30 odd actuators, and an aggravatingly large number of wires and little bits of metal.

It uses sensors to react to people who approach it or look at it and most of the time it is a fairly grumpy and misanthropic machine. You can see a vid of it in action here, in the final testing phases:

Haunted Typewriter typing from anthony goh on Vimeo.

Haunted Typewriter close up from anthony goh on Vimeo.

It’s part of an exhibition called Unleashed Devices at a gallery called Watermans, down in SW London, and the private view is this Tuesday the 14th September 2010.

From the Guardian write up:

“Unleashed Devices brings together students, hackers, designers and artists in an unusual exhibition of interactive sculptures, modified electronic toys and other hacked, mashed and open source works… The projects combine artistic communication with science and technology, robotics, computer vision, physical modelling and psychedelic manipulation techniques…”

There are some really nice pieces of work there, one of my favourites is a sundial that points itself towards any source of light, hence always telling the right time with its shadow. Exhibition catalogue is here.

We have almost electrocuted ourselves, set fire to a lot of things,
and fried many electronic components during the build, and it would be
good to see any of you for a drink (freebies) at the private view. Email me or call me if you’re thinking of coming down.

Haunted Typewriter at Unleashed Devices
Watermans 40 High Street Brentford TW8 0DS
1 September – 22 October 2010
12pm – 9pm daily.

This is a lamp made from scavenged parts which uses heat from one candle to generate electricity to power 6 ultra-bright LED butterflies. It’s a designed for someone who lives off-grid, so it can provide a bright white light source off just one tea-light. It uses the heatsink from an old Dell computer, and a thing called a peltier chip (converts heat into electricity) taken from a 12V fridge.

I was inspired by the amazing instructable from reukpower, and have made a few refinements to the way it all fits together. Pretty happy with it. The most cool thing about it is that the light from the LEDs is really really bright – much brighter than the light of the candle. Spooky huh?

close up of the butterfly – cut from a plastic bottle and painted

One thing that particularly pleased me is that it’s made from hardly any new parts. I only had to buy a transistor and some heat conducting paste.

you can see the circuitry underneath – it’s a circuit known as a joule thief, which sort of transforms the voltage from the peltier chip into something that can run the high-brightness LEDs

inside the tin cans – loft insulation surrounds the peltier chip (the white square)

the finished lamp/mobile

These are shoes attached to LED floor tiles, equipped with a pressure switch so that they light up when you step, just like the Michael Jackson Billie Jean video.

I had this project lying half-built around for ages, but lacked the will to finish it, as I went through this phase of being unable to do any fancy dress without getting a giant sinking empty feeling inside. In the end I’m glad I finished it, it’s one of the best outfits I have ever made. They are much fun/funnier that I thought they would be – people just start dancing around you.

My new thing for projects is trying to make them from as little newly purchased stuff as possible. For this project I had to buy the polycarbonate (£10), the LEDs (cheap – about £5) and the electronics (about another £5), but the shoes and wood are scraps/charity shop.

In the future I will modify them so that they have a “flash on and off” mode as well as pressure mode.

For those who are into it, you can see how they work on Flickr

Just an early warning to say hold the date, The Goat Race is back, at Spitalfields City Farm, just near Brick Lane, on Saturday 3rd April 2010 (Easter weekend). Same day as a similar sounding sporting event.

Image from WowtheWorld

If you’d like to get involved with either the Goat Race, doing a stall or activity, promoting something, or the afterparty, get in touch.

I finally built a site for it at www.thegoatrace.org , and you can join us on Facebook at bit.ly/goatrace .

We are taking on board feedback from last year – more activites and fun surrounding the race, and a better organised afterparty. So stay tuned.