Author Archives: Kingarthursdog

A recent commission was for a garden lighthouse. It had to be tall, and light up automatically when dark. This is the result, it is made from (mostly) 3mm ply which I hand sawed and assembled in my shed. It … Continue reading →

Last week we added the ‘smell machine’ to the cow. This device is custom made for the cow, and circulates a single smell placed in a container inside the machine. The smell machine was 3D printed in parts and then … Continue reading →

A project I have been working on lately is motorising a ‘route roller’, which is a device which allows you to carry and view an A4 route sheet when on your classic motorcycle. Here is the image of the version … Continue reading →

The latest project I am working on with Kate is the interactive cow for MERL. As part of their rehang, they commissioned the building of an interactive cow which can be used by visitors. The cow will be capable of … Continue reading →

This example shows how to control a mains lamp using a 240V relay board and an Arduino Uno. The idea is to randomly flicker the light on and off, similar to an old strip light when it becomes a bit … Continue reading →

The other project for this weekend was a really simple ATTiny85 programmer ‘shield’ for an Arduino Uno. This board fits on top of the Uno and effectively turns the Uno into a programmer for the ATTiny chip. The programmer takes … Continue reading →

This weekend’s programme consisted of several new projects (battery tester, switching mains lights using a microcontroller, an ATTiny programmer and a touch-based instrument), but this post is just about the battery tester. Having worked with schools over the summer using … Continue reading →

Tim Sunerton is currently a student in the Art Dept at The University of Reading and wanted to power a number of roller blinds with motors so that they would move up and down. He had already produced one which moved the blind … Continue reading →

ModKit have produced a visual programming environment for Arduino devices, based heavily upon the Scratch project at MIT. The ModKit Micro IDE uses the Scratch drag and drop interface for assembling simple programs which can be directly uploaded to the Arduino … Continue reading →

We had our showcase events last week at the British Museum in London, where our group of co-researchers from the Tower Project demonstrated their multisensory ‘labels’ to the public. The response from the public was excellent, and the group did a … Continue reading →