"Electric Tenement" reacting to Tweets @ OpenOttawaLibre 2011

On Sept. 28 2011 I was fortunate to partake in OpenOttawaLibre 2011, an “unconference” that brought together a diverse group of “creatives” from the business, technology, and art sectors in Ottawa. Although the agenda of the day wasn’t entirely clear until the event started – in true “unconference” style – the day was actually a facilitated discussion workshop featuring multiple streams of interest, all derived from the central question:

what do we need to do to create a place that sparks opportunity for creative thinkers to collaborate and innovate for a better Ottawa?

From a general networking perspective, OOL11 proved to be a productive opportunity to meet new people and organizations with overlapping interests and mandates in the city – one particular example standing out being the desire expressed by many groups and individuals to have an Ottawa-based electronic arts festival. Although Ottawa is a relatively small city, it never ceases to amaze me how isolated different groups with similar agendas seem to be here; OOL11 provided a great meeting ground for such groups to discover one another. The enthusiasm generated at the event was also contagious, and served as a valuable reminder of the creative potential in Ottawa; I wish there were more events like OOL11 to help bring a unified focus to our efforts.

From a personal perspective, I was happy to bring new exposure to Artengine’s Electric Fields festival to a targeted, interested audience, as well as meeting a new group of potential collaborators from The City of Ottawa’s Community Arts Program, The Ottawa Art Gallery, and Apartment 613.

I was further fortunate enough to be one of 4 artists invited to showcase technical artwork. I chose to show Electric Tenement (the working name for the lighting tower debuted at Urbana 2011), programmed to react to tweets tagged #OOL11 (shown in the opening photo, above).

Guerilla Magazine wrote a feature on the piece and its role at OOL11 here.

Many thanks to Julie Dupont and Caleb Abbott at The City of Ottawa for all their hard work!  Make sure to check out the OOL11 webpage for more info and ongoing discussions.

GigaTera prototype wall lamp

Last week I traveled to Philadelphia to attend Lightfair International 2011, a huge lighting conference featuring an immense trade show floor and a full schedule of lighting-related seminars.

While there, I was guest blogging for Philips’ LightCommunity on their new Events blog.  My first post focused on advancements in LED street lighting, my next post discussed issues surrounding general LED lighting in the home and summarized the keynote by Ingo Maurer, and my wrap-up post captured my impressions of the trade show floor.

Since the majority of the conference is focused on technical learning and driving product sales in the architecture, retail, and commercial sectors, there isn’t too much to take in from an artistic standpoint.  I was pleased, however, to attend a refreshing and inpiring seminar by Leni Schwendinger about her public lighitng projects.

As I see it, the increase in 1% for art programs coupled with the continual advancement of LED architectural lighting is a sure fire recipe for more exciting public lighting projects, so I hope to see greater emphasis on public lighting projects by events like Lightfair International.

[ Eyebeam bio ]

Working with Hernani Dias on the Re:Farm project (see my previous post for some more info about the Re:Farm project), my first objective is to create the PCB for the Re:Farm On The Wall module, a data visualization module using an LED display to present data away from the computer screen.

[ details after the break ]

Here’s Hernani’s original sketch for displaying the soil moisture level from 6 sensors:

This design uses 7 LEDs to display the soil moisture level for each of 6 sensors (42 in all). The design concept has been formalized as seen below:

The module still has 7 LEDs for each sensor (or farm/garden), but with the addition of LEDs between the groups (for a total of 48) to create a complete circle which can be used with other templates, such as the one below, for visualizing other data such as temperature or humidity:

Ideally, the board will also incorporate a stepper motor to drive a needle (like a speedometer) for an additional data channel.

I’m going to first concentrate on the LED display. Since the board will make use of an ATMEGA microcontroller (Arduino) chip and an XBee radio (to receive the data), real estate on the approx. 3″ x 3″ board is already a bit tight, so I am currently researching Charlieplexing, an LED driving scheme which allows N*(N-1) LEDs to be directly driven by N pins of the microcontroller. 8 data pins from the microcontroller can thus be used to control the 48 LEDs since Charlieplexing with 8 pins allows control of up to 8*7=56 LEDs.

At The Next HOPE conference this past weekend (blog post about the conference forthcoming), Jimmie P. Rogers was demo’ing and selling his LoL (Lots of LEDs) Shields for the Arduino. He has a great post about his work with Charlieplexing which I’m currently consulting. Talk about serendipity!

In a way, the overlap between the needs of Hernani’s project and my own interests in lighting and internet-enabled lighting fixtures is serendipitous as well.  It’s great to be working on a project that is seemingly so diverse from my own projects, yet has so much overlap on the technical side.

It’s also been interesting to observe Hernani’s design approach/philosophy which stems from his graphic design background.  It seems like everything starts from the aesthetic: the documentation for the project has some of the nicest component diagrams I’ve seen; and even his calendar is created in Illustrator

This post assumes some knowledge of PCB etching methods and is an account of my experience with the toner transfer method. If this is new to you, you may have to get Googling on a few of things mentioned here. That said, I’ve linked to the sites I found most useful during the process.

Intro

Up until now, I’ve been hand wiring all the the circuits for my Electric Window series.

It’s a fairly straightforward process to build the circuit on a piece of protoboard, and for an Electric Window 3 circuit, it takes about two hours. The bottleneck of this process is preparing all the connecting wires (shown in white in the above photo) and ensuring all the interconnections are correct, ie, connecting the right components to the right pins of the microprocessor and the power and ground points.

While I find this process efficient/adequate for one-off circuits and prototypes, it gets monotonous when making multiple copies of the same circuit.

For our recent contribution to the Chinatown Remixed exhibition, Deb and I (working as The Latest Artists) envisioned a series of Electric Window 3 light boxes, displaying various animations along with text from Twitter via a wireless internet connection. I decied to use this as an opportunity to finally learn how to etch PCBs.

I’d previously been intimidated by the PCB etching process for similar reasons as Collin from Make:

There seemed to be a steep learning curve, as I’d yet to use electronic CAD software such as Eagle, and the actual etchning process seemed finicky and messy.

After watching Collin’s video, a few others on YouTube, and reading some on-line tutorials (found via Google), I decided to attempt etching with the toner transfer method, since I already have a laser printer and clothes iron.

[ More after the break . . . ]

Schematic capture and circuit layout

The first order of business was to electronically capture the schematic and create the board layout.

I knew I’d be creating a single-sided board for the sake of simplicity, so I created a rough layout by hand — based on my existing hand-drawn schematic (not shown) — to get an idea of where the components should best be and which microprocessor pins were best to avoid crossing wires and/or requring jumpers:

As I said, rough, but it was enough to get going.

While there are plenty of software alternatives, free and otherwise, for schematic capture and PCB layout, I decided to go with Eagle because a) it’s free to use for 3″ x 4″ boards, and b) there’s an abundance of resources/help out there for it.

I used this helpful tutorial and parts library from Sparkfun to get going with the program, and soon enough I had my first CAD schematic:

I then moved onto the PCB layout portion and used the auto-route feature to start the intimidating process of trace layout. With a bit of additional tweaking by hand, I had a layout I was happy with. I originally designed the board to be 3″ x 1.5″ but that resulted in tight traces and traces running really close to microprocessor pin connections. Being unsure of the tolerances/accuracy of the etching process to come, I decided to give the circuit more margin and ended up with a 3″ x 2″ board:

Toner transfer

Although I’d repeatedly read that glossy or photo paper was best to print the circuit for transfer onto the copper board, I didn’t have any of these fancy papers on hand, and didn’t want to make a trip to the store if I didn’t have to. So I decided to try it with regular paper.

I readied my otherwise unused clothses iron:

Naturally I didn’t turn it on until resting it on its back, and I wish more turorials were explicit about whether or not you should have water in there or not. The answer is no.

I cut my copper board to size and used a sponge to clean it with isopropyl alchohol (a 70% solution from the drug store).

I grabbed a scrap piece of wood to do the ironing on:

and it didn’t work. After several attempts to iron the circuit pattern onto the pattern from regular paper, it just wouldn’t stick. Whenever I’d move the iron around, the paper would slip and the result would be a smugged circuit pattern on the copper board.

I really didn’t want to make a run to the store for special paper, so I consulted Google instead. I found this great article explaining how you can use glossy magazine paper, the principle being that the laser toner doesn’t stick very well to it, thus making it easy to transfer onto the copper — the same principle behind using special glossy or photo paper I’d previously read about.

I set to work with the cheaper and more easily available magazine paper I already had around, trimming it to fit my printer before making a few prints of the circuit:

Back to the ironing board:

and it stuck! The paper stuck pretty much immediatly after applying heat with the iron, and I was able to move the iron around and evenly heat the entire circuit. Soon I could see the traces through the paper:

I let the board cool a bit, then put it in a sink of warm water. The magazine paper came off very easily, and the traces didn’t budge or scratch away. I’d read that you need to let the paper soak for 5-10 minutes before it’ll come off the board, but I found with the magainze paper it only needed to soak for 2 or 3.

I’d also read that you need to press really hard while ironing, and iron for 5 or more minutes. I’m not sure so much force and time are required with the magazine paper technique, as I ended up with a few smudged traces:

Specifically, there were a few pads that had shorted together on the transfer:

Using an X-Acto knife, I was easily able to scrape spaces between the pads before etching.

Etching

Now the fun part: etching with chemicals!

I decided to use ferric chloride since I didn’t want to mix my own etchant with ammonium persulphate and water, or the like.

I bought some handy etching trays with corner spouts at the local electronics store, and with some chemical resistant gloves, got set up in the utility sink:

Rubber gloves on from this point: I filled one tray with water for rinsing, and I poured about a centimetre (0.4″) of etchant into the other one. I put the circuit board, traces up (more about this later), in the etchant, and let it soak for about 15 minutes. Not much seemed to be happening, so I decided to try the scrubing technique described in Sonodrome’s great tutorial video:

It worked like a charm, the exposed copper started to come off the board, while the circuit traces held up well, even against fairly rigorous scrubbing. Caution needed to be taken at this step to avoid splashing etchant around, though!

Here’s the etched board with the toner still in tact. I think it looks silver/white from remaining fibres of the magazine paper:

Next I used isopropyl alchohol and a sponge (seperate from the one I used to scrub with etchant) to clean off the toner. Some of the pads had smugged edges, faithful to the smudged transfer image, but the board had no short or open circuits:

Drilling and assembly

I trimmed to board to length, and drilled the holes. Since I aready have a Dremel tool, I bought the Dremel drill press attachment and a package of small bits. I also bought the Dremel keyless chuck to accomodate the smaller bits.

Despite not being carbide bits, as recommended by many tutorials for drilling PCBs, they worked fine, and didn’t break or noticeably dull.

Lastly, I populated and soldered the board:

Not the most photogenic, but totally functional I wanted to tin the board, but the local shop where I got my supplies didn’t have any tinning materials.

Initial impressions

So, did I save any time!?

Let’s compare. I takes me 2 hours to make this circuit from protoboard. I’m familiar enough with the circuit that I don’t need to keep refering to the schematic, the real time taking tedium of this method is cutting all the connecting wires.

To learn Eagle and create the PCB layout, I spent about 6 hours. Since this was my first time through the process, I’m not sure how much of this time I should count against the protoboard method.

Etching and drilling, including the necessary clean-up of nasty chemicals was about an hour the first time through. Again, part of a learning process.

Soldering the circuit took only around fifteen minutes, though.

For one circuit board, this definately didn’t save any time.

Rinse and repeat

I needed 3 more boards for the Chinatown Remixed installation, so I did all these in a second etching session.

I made a few modifications to the layout, to run the traces clearer of the microprocessor pads, and to move the programming header (bottom centre) away from the LED screen connector (upper left) to make it easier to program the board when attached to the LED screen (glad I didn’t make all 4 like this!).

Here’s the 3 boards after ironing the toner transfer to the copper:

I did the 3 boards seperately instead of together on one larger boards to experiment with the timing of various steps of the process. This time around, some of my traces broke, so I repaired these with a black Sharpie marker.

All the boards etched successfully, including the portions repaired by the Sharpie. Next, I drilled them: all the small holes first, followed by large holes; I did this in case I accidentally drilled a large hole with a small bit, allowing me to enlarge it if necessary.

Next impressions

So, did I save any time across multiple boards?

The answer is yes! Although, for this circuit I only saved about 15 minutes per board compared to the protoboarding method (not including the time spent learning Eagle). However, I assume there would be more time savings with more complex boards.

That said, I do feel that I saved labour. Soldering each circuit together on a protoboard, making sure to correctly wire each connection requires considerable mental attention, in contrast to the “dumb labour” required to etch and drill the boards, followed by the comparatively easy task of populating the boards without having to handwire all the interconnections.

Another advantage to the PCB method was that Deb and I could work in parallel to solder the boards together.

I also imagine I’ll shave some time off as I become more proficient with the process, so I’ll definately continue to etch my own PCBs!

Some tips

I would highty recommend the use of glossy magazine paper for printing your circuit designs on: it’s cheap/free; you probably have some already; and it comes off in water very easily and quickly.

If you use glossy magazine paper, I found that a lot of ironing pressure wasn’t required, just be firm. I also found it only took about 3-4 minutes (for a 3″ x 2″ board) to do the transfer. More time can actually start to smudge the transfer, as discussed above. You’ll have to experient with this.

High speed steel (HSS) bits seem to work fine. I ordered some additional bits from Digikey for drilling the PCBs, since I’ve read so many times that anything other than carbide bits will dull very quickly when drilling PCBs. I’ve found the HSS bits to work well so far. Bare in mind I’ve only done about a half dozen boards. However, I have yet to break a bit and the bits are much cheaper than carbide. I just bought a bunch of bits to compensate for any dulling. For the price of one carbide bit, I was able to buy 3 HSS bits.

If you are not agitating (ie, constantly moving) the board in etchant, place the board traces up. I’ve heard that putting the traces face down enlists gravity to help remove the etched copper, but I found the ridges on the bottom of my etching tray started to leave lines on my circuit when I didn’t agitate.

The finished product

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably curious about the final product these circuit boards belong to!

They’re used to drive LED displays from Sure Electronics, for a series of Electric Window 3 light boxes in a public art installation.

The following picture shows 3 of the Sure displays cascaded, and the driver circuit with an XBee radio attached:

The XBee is used to wirelessly query a WiFi-enabled master controller (not shown) for strings of text to display, from Twitter; this post has a clear explanation of the final installation.

The black, rectangular connector on the bottom-left of the driver circuit mates directly with the LED display, as shown below:

The dangly bit on the bottom left is the power connector.

Next these units were installed in custom-made, acrylic enclosures:

Here’s some “still on the bench” shots of the finished boxes:

The deadline for this project didn’t permit time for better photos of the final boxes before installation on-site, so stay tuned for more pics and videos.

Thanks for checkin’ all this out, all the best with your circuit etching endeavors!

The audio is straight from a drum machine, triggering the video in real time which is done in Processing; this initial draft shows that this is just the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible . . .

Although I didn’t learn anything new technology-wise, I was very pleased to learn about his great series of techno podcasts.

[ Via Dubspot's blog. ]

The work of production is really reduction.

From this video:

Found via Innercityvison’s blog.

People are finding it easy to publish something without any controls. And this is the problem with the internet in general. There is so much information, and no one knows if it’s true or not. It’s just there. It’s an information monster.

From Resident Advisor’s recent interview w/ Ricardo Villabolos.

Here’s a fantastic survey of embedded computing platforms, covering everything from Arduino to plug-and-play modular systems:

http://www.partly-cloudy.com/misc

Makes for a really handy reference!