This project will be taking some ideas from http://www.smfr.org/robots/ and incorporating them into handmade pottery objects. I was able to meet Simon the other week, and had a really great time talking about the bots. I am very interested in free-energy devices as well as the aesthetics that go into lawns and gardens.
My plan is to use the cavity of the pottery object for battery storage and have some sort of apparatus on top of the object that does an action once it has stored up enough energy from solar panels. I will start small, and hopefully be making some large ones later on.
So I had the awesome opportunity to go to the PCB design workshop in SF the other day and learn about how to make a board from scratch. It was a great day, I felt like I was back in school again. (feels like forever) Anyways, I got to talk to a few people about the project and I even got a dev kit from the Hackaday team!
Tonight I started playing around with it. sad story number 1 is that the studio is Windows only :( So looks like I'll be checking out a new computer. Looks like it's possible on a mac, but not sure if I really want to go down that rabbit hole. make files!?!?! Am I real programmer again? Idk, been pretty happy in python fantasy land. Going to look and see if theres anything I can do about that.
I've also been looking around online at LiPo battery solutions. Looks like this is going to be a must. I really enjoy starting from scratch and learning a bunch of new stuff. I think my next step is to test out some battery storage hacks. I'll be back.
I finally got the piece back. It turned out very nice! A little thicker than I was expecting, but I like the overall look. I also was playing around with some solar powered bots today. It's interesting how you can create complex actions from simple hardware. I am going to experiment with the action that is preformed. I think I want to make it audible somehow.
I finished the mount the other day. I will be firing it and adding electonics soon. You can see the unglazed piece in the gallery. I is about 5-6 inches high. I hope to make some much larger ones later, but want to start small.