This weekend, we hit a major milestone: we successfully put together the voxel cloud. Hundreds of squares and over a thousand zip ties went into the assembly of this object. And we owe it all to you! Thank you, dear backers, for helping to make this happen. You are wonderful, and we love you.
On the electronics front, we have a rain controller! It hooks up to the Raspberry Pi GPIOs and controls up to three valves. The electronics team did a great job of soldering everything together. In other electronics/software news, a bunch of the LED controllers are also done, and Micah wrote a “shader” for the cloud, which lets us do some nice cloud and lightning effects with our 2560 LEDs with a nice, smooth frame rate. Ed and Samson teamed up to give us a touchscreen UI for controlling both light and sound effects.
To be continued as the Cloud continues coming together!
First off, holy shit! Thank you so much, guys. You’re all awesome! At time of writing, we’re almost two-thirds of the way to our goal. Be sure to tell your friends about this exciting new market opportunity!
Here’s what’s new with the Ardent Mobile Cloud Platform:
– Our mist system was delivered today, so expect to see tests with a little less water soon.
– Plans, prototypes, and fabrication for the AMCP are well underway. We got the control and lighting software started, finished the base platform design, worked on the model for the shape of the cloud itself, wrote some code in Grasshopper to help unfold the design into flat patterns for laser cutting, and made prototype voxels (a.k.a the three-dimensional pixels that will make up the cloud shape).
– Our electrical system is taking shape! Micah has created a diagram draft showing how all of the electrical components—from strobes to audio—play together. You can check out the PDF on our newly-created Github project for the cloud.
– On Sunday, we picked up our first load of steel, cut it up and cleaned it, and began welding it together. Ben even cleaned all the rust off those fork pockets, in preparation for painting! The metal crew: Simon, DJ, Micah, Eden, Ben, Ian.
– For prototyping the voxels, we tried bending HDPE with the plastic welder, tested many different strategies for binding the cube edges, and upgraded the air assist on the laser cutter to get better edges on HDPE (and drier air). Big props to Arlen for creating the cube prototypes, and Simon for his edge-joining ideas.
– Lee’s been tuning the design for the cloud’s plastic skin as we finalize the placement of all the internal components. It’s looking really good! Expect to see some new renders soon.
– A few of us went out and carefully measured a sad, graffiti-covered telehandler at a construction site in the Mission. The security guy was pretty friendly, all things considered. It’s a similar model to the one we’ll be using, so now we know how best to build this grassy hill without interfering with the moving parts or scuffing the paint.
Coming up next week: LEDs, software, more steel, and making cubes. Stay tuned!
