Final Year Studio - Development - Arrival/Departure Time Board Design

arrival board, originally uploaded by Jimbo (Alan James Wellock).

Using the above images taken from Bradford Interchange's train station as inspiration I will create an arrival timetable board for my Datamotive idea. Displaying search terms that represent key words that I have come across during the development of my idea, it will show the arrival times of each Datamotive, dependent on the finalised formula for optimum screen representation. This will work as an extra stimulus for widening the associative bandwidth of the installation environment as well as a 'witty' hint for users to find out more about my project.

Final Year Studio - Development - Review #3

datamotives review 3, originally uploaded by Jimbo (Alan James Wellock).

Just a quick report on review #3 of my studio project, Datamotives. I felt it went really well and I think I have concentrated what I was presenting more, resulting in less time spent explaining the idea and more time spent showing the various experiments I have done and first person research. The only thing to do now is make sure my elevator pitch isn't misunderstood and continue making my project!!!

Final Year Studio - Development - Servo SUPER DISASTER!!!

Above is the final experiment I did to try and solve the 'wobbly' servo problem. In the end incrementing the servo arm, changing to Oasis foam for the screen and programming the servo by not using the code library still did not solve the problem. A possible factor is that the small servos simply don't react well to being controlled from a computer, chipping all the gears inside them. A possible solution is use a stepper motor instead that has only one gear and is animated using magnets, resulting in very little wear and tear inside the motor itself, hopefully eradicating any kind of developing wobble. The only problem with a stepper motor is that it cannot keep track of what angle it is at, this then means I would have to use some kind of marker such as a light resister and laser to tell the stepper to reset its angle to 0 for further instructions.

Final Year Studio - Research - Domain Name Facts

As my digital screen development for my idea progresses it is becoming apparent that I will have to decide the number of characters going to be shown on my public display mechanical screen. Although according to the Length Distribution graph located on the link below states that most domain names (2006) are 11 characters long (not including the suffix (.com etc.)), I decided to go with a 10 character long screen (including suffix) so that I can then save two servo or stepper motors for the time of arrival of each URL. In the long run this will not effect the installation, because one of the main points of using two different mediums is to highlight the limitations of each, in this case the limit of not being able to vary in display depending on character length.

Link: Yalfa.com - Facts About Domain Names

Final Year Studio - Research - Grand Central Stands Still

While researching the theme of train stations and time I came across the above video created by improveverywhere.com, which involved 200 'Improv Everywhere Agents' standing still at Grand Central Station, New York. Train users are baffled and amused as it takes a while for each user to notice that some people are not moving in conjunction with the overall crowd.