The last post on this blog was published almost two months ago, and a lot has changed since then.
The fact that I’m doing this project with the intention of taking it with me to Kiwiburn means that I will need to have my art piece registered, and hopefully even get an art grant for it to cover some of the costs of making it.
In order to apply for an art grant, One must answer a bunch of questions in regards to their art piece. The sort of questions that make one really think about what is that they are trying to achieve, and what it is that they need in order complete it, or at least that is the effect they had on me.
One of the biggest aspects of the art grant application is the materials and costs of the project. Getting my head around that required me to do a bunch of research in regards to the electrical circuit in the base of my intercom. At some point I realized that I probably need to contact the person that posted the YouTube video that depicts the basic circuit I started with, because I had a lot of questions and ideas I needed to run through someone who knows how to design and build electrical circuits, so I did.
Contacting that person was probably the most important step in the project, as they had heaps of insights in regards to my ideas, answered my questions without being cheap on words, and had some really good ideas too, on which I’m super grateful. We will probably be in touch later as well as I will move from the design stage to the execution stage.
One of the biggest bits of progress I made with the circuit, was with the help of a couple of friends, as well as the person I mentioned above, and that was the fact that I will incorporate a microprocessor (Arduino or one of it’s likes) that will be in charge of the logic that indicates the system’s state. That is, whether a station is vacant (glowing green), occupied (glowing red), or ringing (flashing white + bell ringing).
Another aspect of the project I started figuring out was the system’s power supply. Ideally, my project would be powered with renewable energy, rather than fossil fuels. As I was realizing the components and the costs of such system, I learned through a Facebook post that there’s an option to borrow that sort of gear (for the purpose of using it for a Kiwiburn art piece), so I contacted them and got a green light. I’m very stoked about that because borrowing these sort of things (solar panels, rechargeable batteries, etc.), from an environmental perspective, is way better than buying new ones.
Another individuals I contacted in regards to my project helped me with finding the long cable I’m after and with the implications of using it (most importantly from a health & safety perspective of having a really long cable running on the ground, hint — it will need to be buried and/or run along a fence line).
Working on the design for the phone booths is also something I’m running through a very skilled and knowledgeable peers. Below are the results so far, and I will elaborate on that in a future post.
The next step is to send through the art grant application.
After that, I will start working on the circuit at a small scale, to make sure that everything works as expected, at least logically. I will discuss that in my next post.
