Category: working

As mentioned previously, I’ve built my tracking mirrors on top of stripped down moving head lights. These mirrors follow the sun across the sky, reflecting the suns light onto a static mirror (what I am calling a target mirror) located in ACCA’s foyer. When installed at ACCA they hang off the side of the building like…

I’ve been testing the moving mirror mechanism on the roof of my studio. I have it shining through the window and hitting a piece of masking tape I’ve stuck on the wall. It can hold this position for a number of hours, but then things go awry. It seems to be resetting itself. On investigation,…

I think I just found the solution to what happens when the sunlight reaches the end of its path. Solar hot air balloons. I’ve been looking at these online but hadn’t got around to making one – I’m so glad I just did. They are beautiful.

This morning I focused all four mirrors on the one spot. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – spontaneous combustion maybe. It wasn’t quite that dramatic, the temperature reached fifty-one degrees.

I’m making a master control box for the moving mirrors. This will allow me to turn them on and off individually. The control box will sit upstairs in Chunky Move’s plant room. While installing the switches I lost one of the rear mounting washers. As a result the middle switch sits slightly higher then the…

I dropped a screw on my studio floor. Found it.  

I’m contemplating titles for the work. So far I have the following: New Millennium Fountain Karen’s favourite is: I’m just holding up a mirror. The title is inspired by Spiro but I don’t think either of them are serious.

I’m putting the control circuitry for the moving mirrors into an aluminium box, to be mounted next to the moving head mechanism.   It’s a tight fit but I am happy with how it is coming together. The Arduino Pro Mini controllers are mounted on header sockets so they can be removed if needed. The…

I’ve decided to make 5 moving mirror units instead of 6. This will save me quite a bit of time and means I have some spare parts – just in case.

I’m making 6 moving head mirror units. While 6 is not a huge number it really gives the project a production line feel – every time I make a modification to the design I have to repeat the process 5 more times. Not to mention the 30 (or more) fixed mirror supports that still need…

I have to work out how to get a moving mirror to reflect sunlight onto a static target mirror. Rather than calculate where the sun will be at a particular moment in time and then adjusting the mirrors position to suit, I have decided to set up a feedback loop. The target mirror will talk…

Whenever I get on the internet to research this project I tend to end up at a project like this. The Solar Forge by Tom Riley. There are no shortage of DIY solar collectors on the internet and there is definitely something exciting about watching a piece of 2 by 4 spontaneously burst into flames. I’m…

There are going to be a lot of mirrors in this work, maybe as many as 50, and each mirror will need to be adjusted and fixed at a specific angle. I’ve started making support structures for these static mirrors. They look like this – ply and MDF. I made 13 of these yesterday –…

I’ve decided to use plywood to mount the mirrors to the moving heads. This should be waterproof (at least for the 2 month duration of NEW13) and fits well with the DIY aesthetic that is developing in the project. The face is counter balanced with pieces of steel plate.  

Ask and you shall receive.

If I’m going to mount moving mirrors on the outside of ACCA then my dinky ply construction (from a previous post) just ain’t going to cut it. I need some more serious tech. Andrew gave me this moving head light to experiment with. This thing is solid – pan and tilt movement, good bearings, mostly…

While ACCA gives a good impression of being completely windowless there are a few places where light enters the building. I set up cameras and took some time-lapse video.   This video shows the sun moving through the kitchen space at ACCA. It was filmed on 14th January from 9:00am to 3:15pm. There is direct…

A little experiment to test the multiple mirror idea.

Today I toured ACCA’s roof. It’s quite a confusing space, with a lot of plant. This is the west end (front). This is the east end (back). The wall provides an edge around the roof perimeter. The height varies between about 300mm to 3m. Many of the screws in the wall capping are loose –…

I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the sunlight I plan to collect. While searching for inspiration I came across the IcyBall, an early refrigeration unit that is powered by heat. (image from Crosley Automobile Club) This ingenious device was developed simultaneously in North America and Australia and sold during the 1920s and…

While the thought of power tools screaming full-tilt across the ACCA forecourt is compelling, the challenge of bringing light into the gallery has begun to capture my imagination. There is a beautiful work by Olafur Eliasson called Your Sun Machine where Eliasson removes a circular section of the gallery roof and allows the sun (and presumably other…

I’ve started work on NEW13. Which means, I’ve started thinking about it – multiple, divergent, thoughts. There are two main (and seemingly unrelated) themes emerging: 1. something to do with sunlight and 2. a community event such as power tool drag racing. (image from Baltimore Node Hackerspace).