Images of THR_033 from the museum

Dezeen picked up the tea house on the blog today.  Click the image to read their description:

 John also posted some great pictures from the opening.  Here is a link to his post.

Here is the smile scanner in action:

THR_033 - Tea House shipped to Japan

Things have been busy, but now that THR_003 has been shipped to Japan things might settle down a bit.  Here is a sampling of the process, development, and construction.  John and Cezanne left for Japan on Friday and will be assembling the parts this coming week.  Photos from the museum will be available very soon.  The show opens July 9 and goes through August 22.  Here is a link to the the exhibit information.

Here it is crated and waiting for FedEx.

Here is the tea house lit from the inside.

Detail of the yupo laser cut surface.

Here is the laser cut surface being assembled on the table.

Assembly / system diagram.

Prototype of the operable openings.

Process representation of a flat paper skin.

Skin prototype to detail the paper seams.

Flat paper skin with operable opening.

Early drawings for the tea house.

SmartSurfaces - Digital Project PowerCopy Sun Tracker

Tutorial based on demo from SmartSurfaces.  The tutorial covers the creation of powercopies with embedded / dynamic parameters.

Click image to launch video.

SmartSurfaces - Digital Project Theo Jansen Tutorial

Digital Project tutorial builds a Theo Jansen leg mechanism to explain sketches and constraints.

Click image to view tutorial.

SmartSurfaces is up and running

The SmartSurfaces course had its first meeting on September 11.  There are 24 U of M undergrads enrolled (8 from Arch, 8 from Art and Design, 8 from Material Science).  The students will form 4 teams to design and build a final prject that explores interaction, fabrication, and heliotropic structures.

At the heart of the course and the project is the Arduino open-source electronics prototyping board.  This past week we had all the students working with their Arduinos.

The course website has an absolutely amazing set of Arduino resources and original tutorials produced by John Marshall.  Students will be posting their work to the site, so it will be worth checkinh back.

Here are a couple of videos of the students' Arduino studies after a couple of hours:

Briena - Color mixing with 3 LEDs.



Peter - Light sensor controling an LED

Peter - Dialing in the servo motor