Once upon a time, I put a tiny Windows machine inside an Apple III’s case. See this page for details.

At long last, I’ve hacked open a few mice and made a matching one-button mouse with the innards of a Logitech optical USB mouse. Sure, it can only left-click, but that’s part of the charm!

By the way, I switched the Logitech mouse to a blue diode in 2002 just to see if I could. It wasn’t part of the project this time. Yes, the accuracy suffers a little. This is part of why I chose to cannibalize it for the Compy III project.

For my second time around in OSU Art & Technology’s Robotics class, we went for a bit more of a challenge, using loose PIC chips instead of the Basic Stamp. We built our own circuits with sockets in them, then socketed microprocessors we programmed and “burned”.

The concept I was working with here is that due to fairly typical insecurities about my art, I get uncomfortable when people look at it, even in a gallery setting. The piece consists of a small box, painted the white of the gallery space. On this box is a title card with “Title Card” and my name on it. A few feet to either side of this box, mounted on the wall, are two small white objects about the size of matchbooks. Emerging from their tops are bright red puffballs on springs. If you approach the central box to examine the title card, the red puffballs on springs spin to get your attention. If you approach from the right, the left puffball (the one in your field of vision) spins and vice versa. The closer you get to the title card, the more quickly the balls spin, desperate for your attention.

The spinning balls were powered by tiny remote control car motors. Their controllers were wired directly to the PIC in the central box. When the ultrasonic sensors on the front sides of the box detected something in front of them, they signaled the appropriate remote unit over radio waves, triggering the spinning response. It was almost too easy to hack into the remote control mechanism. It felt like it shouldn’t have worked so nicely, but it did. Perhaps that’s because the tiny RC cars were just a few dollars a piece at Big Lots?

These videos were taken in-situ at the quarterly Art & Technology exhibition:

The Robotics class at The Ohio State University begins with a crash course in electrical engineering and culminates with a single large, complicated, usually expensive project. My project was a plastic hand, the likes of which you find at toy stores, connected to a steel framework with a hand pad in the center. Pressing your fingers into the springy fabric of the hand pad would cause the hand to react.

The hand pad concealed five flex sensors harvested from an old, rotten Power Glove. I got the glove for $15 on eBay. Buying the sensors new would have cost about $10 a piece. The sensors were sandwiched between two layers of extremely elastic fabric. When active, these sensors would collect data on how many fingers were being pressed into them. The pseudo-robotic hand would then express the same number using a binary method of finger counting I learned from some KGB (Keeping Geeks Busy) members at Carnegie Melon University. My goal was to depict how even simple concepts like one-digit numbers are understood differently by a machine.

Initially the Art faculty at OSU wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the project. After visiting artist Stellarc expressed interest in my project, however, there was a sudden spike in my esteem within the Art & Technology program.