Today, I managed to solder a ‘Miniduino’, an Arduino clone that I won over the weekend! Marc told me that makers can often save a lot of money by buying non-soldered kits, this is a good thing to remember as electrical soldering although takes some concentration is not rocket science so most people should be able to do it.
Tomorrow, I will start to develop the form of the final piece. Today, I wanted to investigate how my fluid line sketches will look edge lit on perspex. Basically, this process involves the laser cutter. It will etch lines on perspex and even glass. When lit from the side with a strip light for example, the etches will catch the light and become illuminated. You can convert your traditional work from a scan or photo in the free application Inkscape using bitmap tracer and then use this to print using the laser cutter.
This technique is often used in advertising and show displays and gives an exciting ‘city lights’ effect. In the final piece, I want to use this method for some aspects of the work as I want the ‘fluid’ elements of the work to be from my actual drawing work. I do not want to make a purely precision mathematical sculptural form. I want it to have rough and chaotic elements. I also am printing some ‘nets’ on paper of some cloud forms from 3dsMax. The nets can be created in 123dMake. Watch this space for how this will turn out!…
