Found Objects not for Function

I’ve been using found stuff in various projects. One thing that’s come forward is that it’s bad for pure function in mechanical systems. They are cumbersome and labor intensive to incorporate. There’s no reuse of templates, concepts or installation details.

They are great to make a statement related to your message or purpose so it’s only affordable to use them sparsely and only if they are central to audience experience.

For instance a power supply (not very found-objecty) for a rooster project or a drawing or painting robot is more costly to install from found junk than to buy.

For example I have a collection of power supplies that I like to reuse into projects. This hasn’t gone well. Despite having a lot of them, I often wind up buying one since the one I need is never on hand. So the space taken by storage is not worth it. To the right you see some buck converters which I bought (they break apart into 10 converters). They can convert a power supply to any voltage. They will help get my power supplies out the door and after that, I will be more careful about acquiring stuff that isn’t allocated to a project.

Acrylic Paint/Ink

I picked up some more colors and another product to try. One of the things that I had in my mind when I visited Wallack’s today was the jars. I need to make sure my machine can accept them. I thought of picking a jar type and then going with that but it dawned on my toady that I could have mount insert for each jar type. So that gets rid of my jar anxiety.

Actuators (Motors)

Michael gave me these arduino servo drivers. There’s a cool arduino sheild that accepts three of them! Can you say “X-Y-Z”? Anyways, this is a totally exciting prospect to have servo drives instead of stepper motors.

I have some very nice motors that will work with these do I will get this up and running and start a thread to solve the software and install the servos into a painting or drawing robot.

So this will be a third painting robot to hit the drawing board. I have Little Dipper, Big Dip but what to call this one?  What format to make the machine? Large? Small? I’m supposing it should be a gantry system….

Thoughts?