This project’s getting legs!
My impression of a chimney sweep. Or just someone who moved a bunch of steel rod.

Box buildin’.

Solderin’.

Mounting solar panels.

Kickstarter page is here.

Thanks so much to all of our backers! It’s not even a week and we’ve almost fulfilled our initial goal! The Kickstarter link is here if you want to help out.

It’s been a really busy and very productive week.
We got lumber and built the Big Box – this will house… well, everything – the computer, sound and light control, batteries, voltage converters and other power management. It will have a filtered fan to run air through the Box and keep all the components from getting too hot. We hope. This is one of the times to keep tabs on the temperature specs of all of your materials. (This weekend I learned the heat tolerance for industrial velcro, for instance. Handy!) Fortunately for us, the project will only run at night, and electronics generally handle cold better than heat.

These are the relay boards that will control the light bulbs:

I finished the build on the tiniest 24 channel amplifier!

The other lumber was for mounting the solar panel array. (I’ve been calling this part of the build the panel-panel.) At first we thought we were going to use 10 of the solar panels, but the math has that down to six, so this is actually 40% smaller than what we originally thought:

We’ve been taking stock of the cable supply to make sure we have long enough runs to get all the sound and power where they need to go, and taking this time to spool them all. This is a really tedious job, but we’re reusing cables from the installation on the Foshay Tower at Northern Spark, and I’ll admit it was hastily deinstalled. The runs are up to 125′ long, and were very prone to massive tangles. Doing this now will likely save us hours once we’re on playa, and spending those hours on a nice summer day in the shade is much more pleasant than in the hot desert sun:

We also purchased all the steel rods that we’ll use to fabricate the lampposts; production on those will begin this week.

Once again, huge thanks to our backers. I’ll begin collecting information for backer rewards as soon as I can, so keep and eye on your email.

The Kickstarter link is here if you want to help out!

The blog has been pretty silent for a while, I realize, but it hardly means I’m not keeping myself busy. Quite the opposite.

A small crew and I have taken on bringing Status Update, my project from the Artists on the Verge fellowship last year, out to the middle of the desert for the Burning Man festival.

For anyone unfamiliar, Burning Man is a huge annual art festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. It’s the world’s largest leave-no-trace event, and it’s what largely inspired me to start making interactive work in the first place. You can read more about it here.

Getting this project rebuilt to withstand one of the least hospitable places on the planet is a really great challenge.

Let the fun begin!

Power!
My primary collaborator David is in charge of the power system. The middle of the desert doesn’t have any power but what we bring out with us, and where I thought everything would run on a (large, noisy) gas generator, he’s gone all out and decided to build a system that will make the whole project run via solar panels.
This is huge.

No, literally. Here’s a photo of one of the panels. It’s 18 feet long.
We’ll be using at least 6 of these.

And these are the rechargeable batteries those panels will charge. These each weigh about 50 pounds. My hand is on the floor for scale; they’re about the size of a car battery:

All that still wouldn’t run the equipment the older version of the project used, so, the amplifiers and computer are being replaced with new ones that are much smaller and much more energy efficient.

Computer!
The original version ran on a mac mini and an Arduino mega. The desert version will run on a wee unix computer called a Beaglebone. It fits nicely inside a mint tin:

Sound!
The original version used 12 standard consumer stereo audio amplifiers, like this:

Those are being replaced by 12 of these:

Programming!

This weekend, we finally got our Kickstarter together. If you have the interest and means to help us out, we’d be so grateful.

This week, we’ll be getting the steel we need to build the lampposts, and hopefully all the components I need to finish building the amplifier system will arrive. More updates soon!