Scrapyard Challenge!

Scrapyard Challenge

September 25, 2011

Our team (Galina, Yong, Jason) decided to make a musical sailing ship entitled “Sound Wave.” In the beginning, we just started to tear apart junk in order to find some useful parts. All three of us wanted to make something that spun therefore we picked out a CD player. Unfortunately, although the time display and radio was working, the cd rotation did not work. We wanted an automated rotation but because parts were indeed from junk, the cd rotation motor seemed to have broke. Since then, we changed our concept so that – when in best-case scenario – the wind would be able to control the “sail” of the boat.

As seen on the picture above, random wires attached to the CD. These wires were connected to the power through aluminum foil and solder. The wire on the yellow tube would provide the input for the MIDI device and make sounds as the wire touched the wires on the CD. The two wires attaching would basically serve as the switch.

Because we wanted to create more musical notes, we decided to put a more wires grew out of the cd. As seen in the picture above, we color-coded the green and purple wires to make two other sounds. As the CD turned, this would not only affect the movement of wires on the CD, but would also affect the green and purple wires to create more crazy music!

This is the finished result of the “Sound Wave.” It has three different inputs color-coded yellow, green, and purple.

The inputs would be connected to the blue wires while the power source was connected to the red wires.

It was really fun playing around with junk. At first, i was thinking to myself if I could actually get junk to produce music. I realized the power of aluminum foils, wires, and solders. It was very fun to think of other methods of switches and to make totally random music!

Below is the video link of our Sound Wave working. You can’t really hear our sound because the video was taken during the huge music jam session.

Scrapyard Challenge

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scrapyard Challenge 2011 Parsons DT


For the scrapyard challenge I teamed up with Peter Chang, I-Shan Naomi Lin, and Wen Ching to build a robot. Initially I made a robot that was about 12 inches tall, however it ended up being too heavy to move on the motorized ball. So we decided to cut the bottom of the robot and see if that would fix the problem. Unfortunately it was still too heavy to move so we cut a bit more and a bit more…. and yet it still weighed too much. As a result of this discovery in the process the team opted to create a smaller robot. We created a bride and groom and an aisle with an obstacle course. The grooms mission was to meet the bride and on his way he would come in contact with pillars of tin-foil. The area box was covered in tin-foil so it was conductive and the groom was wired so that every time he hit a wall or pillar a noise/music was made. Check out the Vimeo video of our final presentation and project. I compiled a video documenting the progress of my project and my peer’s work. You may view the video of our Scrapyard project on Vimeo. There is also an album on FlickR that captures our project from start to finish. View my FlickR album of Scrapyard Challenge 2011 Parsons DT

Scrapyard was a fun project and I ended up creating something fun from junk.