THE TINKERING STUDIO

THE TINKERING STUDIO

 

Artist-in-Residence: Kazu Harada

27

Mar / 19

27 Mar / 19

Posted by Ryoko

We had an artist in residence during the Curious Contraptions show last winter.  His name is Kazu Harada, an automata artist from Japan. Kazu spent two weeks with us, building an interactive ball run in the Tinkering Studio. 

Kazu’s ball run has a big central spinning wheel that you can crank to lift the balls and send them off to the tracks.  Once the balls are released from the top, a splitter distributes the balls onto two separate routes.  Throughout the tracks, there are fun elements such as a musical wheel, a moving staircase that you can crank to elevate the balls, or an elevator to lift the balls straight to the top. All the balls eventually come back to the central wheel to start the experience all over again. And of course, since this is a modular type marble machine, you can re-arrange the course in your own way!

The first opportunity for him to show his ball run was at the After Dark event. In response to the event theme “GLOW,” Kazu decided to add glowing elements to his machine and light up the environment with UV lights.

One element of his marble machine that the visitors especially liked was a chicken toy that got activated with the ball. He created a tin foil switch and set a relay so that when the ball rolls on the switch the chicken gets activated (singing and dancing) for five seconds. It was so  popular that the chicken kept dancing all night long during the event. You can see the photo album of the event here.

 

 

After the event, he started exploring circuitry and programming so he could incorporate a motor (toy), a speaker, and a light into his ball run. There was also a happy coincidence that his residency overlapped with Jie Qi’s for just one day. He got the opportunity to learn Chibitronics programming directly from Jie! 

Kazu continued exploring adding computational elements to his classic ball run even after his residency. We enjoyed seeing some of the evolution of his project on his twitter feed. Here is one example of his computational ball run with a Micro:bit, a servo motor, and a simple switch. 

 

As we continue to prototype with computational marble machine elements, I think a servo motor and a switch with Micro:bit will be what we try next in the Tinkering Studio. If you are new to Micro:bit or computational tinkering, here it is, I've created a simple illustration to show how you can wire each component with Micro:bit and how to code. The code means, "When the switch (Pin 0) is closed, show a smiley face, and move the servo (Pin 1) 0 to 180 degrees back and forth 4 times". You can create a switch with tin foil or any other conductive materials. The servo motor sweeping motion can be a waving hand, an open/close gate, or any kind of decorative or functional addition to your marble machine. The possibilities are endless!

Reflecting back on our time with Kazu, we are so thankful that he tried many new things during the two weeks of his residency: building a glowing marble run, experimenting with UV light, creating lightweight blocks to add height to the ball run, prototyping LEGO pull-string motor automata, and deep diving into the computational marble machine prototyping with us. We learned so much from him, and the collaboration invigorated our collective enthusiasm around those topics. 

I hope our collaboration will continue remotely and look forward to further development of the computational marble machines!