wrapping up

Posted on by marrs

I have had a luxurious summer break and haven’t touched the FPGA video synth for almost two months.

I want to wrap up the project. I’ve just looked through the blog to see what I can take from it :

  • I want to expose the FPGA synth in its current state (with minimal or no modifications) at TEI 25′ and in Xiao’s space.
  • I want to make a kind of research paper / presentation with the HDMI imbalance hack. This is the coolest, most unexpected thing I found and it absolutely requires the FPGA and knowledge of verilog. I don’t want to go further towards the engineering tasks I was engaged in, nor the superficial design activities.

Specificity, and its details, was one of the keys about writing good scripts for the Making of Sopranos documentary Wise Guy. For this reason I don’t think making a framebuffer and then seeing all the different ways I can modify a single input image really makes any sense, there are just too many possibilities and it is too general / too much of an engineering project. Remember this broken screen project with videos playing : https://haoni.art/spin-III.

I could see my series of “design research chapters” as being composed of a series of mini strategies :

  • freezing a single computer in time by stretching it up (prepared plotter, prepared 3D prints)
  • one input, many different interpretations because machines are idiosyncratic (prepared CRT controller)
  • the world view of the computer program (Revit internal IDs)

The natural things to test would be :

  • How can I mess with the HDMI color balance, what is the range of possibilities trying different imbalances ?
  • How do different screens react ?
  • Could this be a kind of hacking of various video protocols like VGA, DVI and HDMI ?

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I’ve been trying to develop a simple, tangible AI workshop for designers / artists but so far it looks impossible to do in the way that I want.

The huggingface series is nice, not too technical. The machine vision series has some good background.

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Kits for art/design + tech workshops / open source projects I could make :

Take project I’ve done / not completed and turn it into a kit ?

Think about what building block modules missing from electric workshop (audio amp module, stepper motor module) ? But at the same time, I want the participants to appropriate their project and not feel like they are using blocks.
Motors with preprogrammed motions that can be used together ? (motor, microchip, driver ic, rechargeable battery ?)
Mini card/cardboard CNC cutter ? This is a major mech eng project, and I never make card models for any purpose.
Video generator for breadboard experiments, possibly a little memory module ?
Exploded grbl 2D plotter already drawing an image, something that art students can détourne instead of just working with abstract forms?
Mini polargraph drawbot with small steppers that can be hung anywhere and draw with anything?
Solar marble machine, solar winch, solar rope climbers, solar gong ?
Cardboard servo robots?
Going further with low power radio mesh sensors? But this is pure eng/science and not a fun, creative project.

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Curious thing but I am coming back to the desire to make a video synth project. But it would have to be environmentally non-horrible. The only way I can see to do this is with aluminium substrate (100% recyclable) and making a one-sided board, and using recycled e-waste keyboards. I could edit the footprints of the mechanical keys so that the plastic parts go through the board but that the connections stay on the top side (aluminium on the bottom). The complexity of the board would need to be limited to not require any vias. No through hole components so either SMD VGA or just SMD HDMI. Then there is the difficulty of soldering with a giant heat sink underneath, I might need to use the oven or get it assembled elsewhere. The keys are the big challenge as they don’t come in SMD. One solution would be to modify the footprint to drill a hole near the connections so that I can manually wire them without danger that they short.

I would need to also replace the USB C connector to a fully SMD version.

Or maybe I do it in flexible, seeing as I haven’t tried that yet, and then add a lasercut or 3D printed stiffener to hold the keys in place. This way I don’t have the challenges of heat dissipation or the one-sided circuit board constraint. But then I have new issues : the connectors won’t be stiffly in place so any plugging won’t be possible. Stainless steel (100% recyclable) can be used as a stiffener but it is thin 0.1mm.

Rogers and Teflon substrates are toxic and not recyclable.

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I feel a tension when learning about electronics engineering as a designer : the engineering is telling me to continue to learn about more and more complex systems (I’ve wanted to go towards optics and high frequency boards, for instance), and yet these have no interest from a design perspective.