experimental horology
I apologize for not updating about projects recently. The one big one that I've finished (fireprop) isn't officially public until this weekend. I should get a post up about it next week.
So what have I been obsessing over otherwise? Well, this.
It may look like the back of a roadsign being used for target practice, but it is, in fact, a sundial. A digital sundial. The idea is simple enough. It's obvious enough that you can make a series of baffles which will block the sun during some hours and allow it to shine a dot through during others. Well, you can get some surprising resolution doing that, down to 5-10 minutes if you take care. And if you put a whole bunch of those dots together, you can create any pattern you want which changes over the day however you want. So, theoretically, you can do something like this...
This animation isn't just a mock-up, it's an actual simulation done in a ray tracer. The shadows being cast are due to a (very complex!) set of parallel plates like the one above, and the light source is following the same arc that the sun will at Black Rock City on September 3, 2010. Because, well, where else would I be installing something like this? It runs from about 8:00 to 17:00, updating every 10 minutes for that entire range. And since I'm using the constructive solid geometry functions, working out the design of the plates is actually pretty simple. I just have to print out the final plates, glue them onto some sheet metal, and cut them out. (Or maybe send them off for CNC water-jet cutting.)
Proof of concept! Well, kind of. As the first rendering shows, there isn't much left of the plate in places. The design will need to be tweaked so bits of metal don't need to be floating in midair anymore. This is also being rendered in an ideal ray tracer world. I need to do a lot more testing to see how it will react to real world imperfections. But worst of all, the current design isn't tracing out complete arcs, but differencing out cylinders based on the sun position every 10 minutes. This reduces shape complexity so rendering each frame of that animation above only took 1.5 hours. But it leads to the following result if I place the sun at 11:53.
I really love this idea, but there remains a lot of design work to be done.
So what have I been obsessing over otherwise? Well, this.
It may look like the back of a roadsign being used for target practice, but it is, in fact, a sundial. A digital sundial. The idea is simple enough. It's obvious enough that you can make a series of baffles which will block the sun during some hours and allow it to shine a dot through during others. Well, you can get some surprising resolution doing that, down to 5-10 minutes if you take care. And if you put a whole bunch of those dots together, you can create any pattern you want which changes over the day however you want. So, theoretically, you can do something like this...
This animation isn't just a mock-up, it's an actual simulation done in a ray tracer. The shadows being cast are due to a (very complex!) set of parallel plates like the one above, and the light source is following the same arc that the sun will at Black Rock City on September 3, 2010. Because, well, where else would I be installing something like this? It runs from about 8:00 to 17:00, updating every 10 minutes for that entire range. And since I'm using the constructive solid geometry functions, working out the design of the plates is actually pretty simple. I just have to print out the final plates, glue them onto some sheet metal, and cut them out. (Or maybe send them off for CNC water-jet cutting.)
Proof of concept! Well, kind of. As the first rendering shows, there isn't much left of the plate in places. The design will need to be tweaked so bits of metal don't need to be floating in midair anymore. This is also being rendered in an ideal ray tracer world. I need to do a lot more testing to see how it will react to real world imperfections. But worst of all, the current design isn't tracing out complete arcs, but differencing out cylinders based on the sun position every 10 minutes. This reduces shape complexity so rendering each frame of that animation above only took 1.5 hours. But it leads to the following result if I place the sun at 11:53.
I really love this idea, but there remains a lot of design work to be done.