50 Days

As I said in the first post, I have a moth-like draw to blinking lights. It’s not just blinking lights; More specifically, it’s industrial & scientific control panels & user interfaces from the mid 20th century.  They were chock with gauges, dials, knobs, buttons, levers, switches, lights (both blinking and steady), and all manor of diverse & clever information display technologies.

But lets start with blinking lights. There are quite a lot of ways to perform the seemingly simple task of blinking a light, and over the next 50 days, I’m going to explore a bunch of them.

Here’s my first stab at outlining these methods. It’s no way exhaustive,  and I’m not going to get to all of them:

• Electromechanical
  • flasher relays
  • flasher bulbs
  • mechanical chasers
• Electronic
  • harmonic oscillator
  • relaxation oscillator
  • multivibrator
  • 555 timer IC
• Microcontroller – C & Assembly
  • Dumb loop
  • Timer interrupts
• Computer controlled – higher level languages
  • C / C++
  • Python
  • Max/MSP / Puredata

This blog is intended to chronicle my first attempt at a daily routine of experimentation & iteration across a few technology domains. This is modeled after the ‘100 Days of Making‘ class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Paula Ceballos is a professor at ITP, and a coworker at Deeplocal, where she’s inspired a few of us to follow along in the process. We’re truncating this to a 50 day challenge; I forget why, but I’m on board with it.

There really aren’t a lot of constraints on the subject matter – you can see past examples on class page. In our group at the office, the list includes Crocheting, Journaling, Hand Lettering, Essays, and Sewing.

I have decided to do ’50 Days of Blinking Lights’. I have a moth-like attraction to anything with blinking lights, and there’s just so many ways to accomplish this seemingly simple task; from relays,  vacuum tubes, RC circuits, or 555s, up to microcontrollers programmed in assembler, basic or C.   It seems like a good way to exercise some existing skills, bolster some that have long been forgotten, and learn some new ones. Most importantly though, it’s just about having enough dedication and focus to chip away at some craft every day. The dead of winter seems as good a time as any to start an endeavor like this. The only snag is an eminent move, but I’m going to try my best to keep at this, even if some days are just blog entries with ideas, research, or learnings.