Porij's Blog

AVL forthcoming event – Whitley Arts Festival Oct 15th

porij — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:00:21 +0000

This will be my second year of providing illumination of St Mary’s church, in central Reading.

“Soundscape artist Chris Lambert plots the sounds from around the Church and uses the pre recorded sound as a basis to create live and improvised music, whilst Porij constructs a visual laser display to harmonise with the music and its environment”.

Proposed Illumination of St Mary’s church.

More detail to this event, can be found here:

http://www.whitleyartsfestival.co.uk/default.asp?id=161&ver=1

AVL Event – Kitchen Club Woods Party

porij — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:25:11 +0000

KC managed to put on two woods events this summer. The first in July, on the hottest day of the year and the second on the August bank holiday. The images here come from the 2nd event, where earlier in the day I had purchased a new camera, a Panasonic TZ10. I’ve had several digital cameras over the last 6 years, none of them were able to perform in the dark environments of gigs, where I wanted to record my light-shows. My last camera, a Fuji compact failed to provide any audio when recording video clips, the sound would be overloaded, clipping and distorted. To my relief the TZ10 performed perfectly with audio, from the the rear, behind the fire right up to the DJ’s, within a few feet of the speakers and provided crystal clear stereo sound. With manual aperture and shutter control, along with 16x optical zoom, I finally had a camera with a performance close to my old 35mm SLR. The positive feedback I received from facebook friends, expressing that this was the first time they had seen images of the ‘dark-side’, during the parties and considering I was also learning to use the camera in the dark, I knew I’d made the right choice of camera. Now I can record most of what I see, even in the dark. The TZ10, will also be extremely useful for my studies at University.

Green alien in smoke, fire-dancing!

Gargoyle image in smoke.

Concentric rings, lasers in smoke.

Sunrise 6.02 am, no zoom.

Sunrise 6.03 am, x16 zoom.

Projects_Alien Vision Lasers

porij — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:14:38 +0000

Back in early May, a DJ friend, Wax Equestrian asked me if I would be able to make him a ‘Lunch-box’ laser, similar to a prototype laser I’d built in a lunchbox. I had used a 100mW red diode laser, this shone through a 5mm dia multifaceted crystal, mounted on a mains motor with gearbox, producing around 8 RPM. He asked if I could add a green laser, and make it so both lasers ran through the same crystal, also to fit a rechargeable battery and put it into a ‘Sponge Bob & Square Pants’ lunchbox he had. This he supplied, along with some DC motors, gearboxes, crystals, a retro on/off switch and the 100mW red and 50mW green lasers.

A second, slightly larger Sponge Bob lunch box was also supplied for the project. I chose to mount all the PSU’s on one platform with spacers to another platform above with the lasers mounted on it, along with the crystal, motor and mirror.

The power supply for the crystal was made using an LM317 and a few components to produce 1.2 volts for the motor. Heat-sinks and a fan were fitted where required. With the lasers fitted into the lunch-box, a battery large enough to use the remaining space was purchased.

After supplying the system to Wax, he reported that the motor/gearbox would stall at times and was trouble to get going. Also could I make the lasers usable, from his trucks battery (12v) or from the mains, without using the internal battery.

During these projects, I had dismantled an old Radio Controlled car to remove the servo and found that if I removed the ‘stops’ on the potentiometer and the plastic housing, the servo would run continuously. This was a wonderful solution to the problem of finding motor/gearboxes, I could control. I purchased a ‘Micro-T’ servo from Slough Radio Models, and made the mods required, this worked perfectly. I ran the servo from a LM317 PSU on 5volts supply and used a Potentiometer to control the output, (RPM).

To reduce the RPM even further, I’ve added a final reduction wheel to the servo, now 3.5 times slower. I found a circuit on-line, for charging the battery that also used an LM317, to produce 13.8v required for charging.

The system can now be used, whilst charging from the mains or used on the trucks power, without using it’s own battery.

Project started late May 2010 and finished early July.

Modifications: Servo adapted and fitted , variable PSU and charging PSU, carried out during August 2010.

Projects_Alien Vision Lasers

porij — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:14:37 +0000

May 2009, before starting university I had been approached by a biker friend, Slug who is customizing an old Viva car from the 1970′s. He said he would like to bounce red and green, sound-to-light laser beams onto the roof, inside his car. I had ordered the lasers, a 40W amplifier module and various components, but once I had started university, I neither had the time or focus of mind required for the project.

Having overcome the problem of combining the two laser beams down one path, from doing Wax’s project. I could use the sound/light transducer in the conventional way, using one central mirror, rather than one for each laser beam. I had originally thought of using a Dichroic filter to combine the beams, but there was a lot of beam power lost, this way. On Wax’s project, I used a 5mm front surface mirror for the red laser at 45 degrees, to the green beam. This enabled the beams to run parallel a couple of mm apart. The system consisted of a: 40 Watt amplifier and volume/on-off switch to be mounted in the dash and fed from the line-out of the car audio system. The lasers and transducer unit for mounting at the rear, either where the rear-seats were or on the parcel shelf, with the modulated beams traveling through the car, to be bounced on to the roof from a distorted Mylar reflector, fixed to the dash. The 3rd unit also mounted at the rear contains a 12v to 2 x 5 volt PSU’s and PSU’s for the two lasers. I started this project at the end of June 2010 and completed it by the end of July 2010.

28th May 2010

porij — Fri, 28 May 2010 18:56:58 +0000

The Magic of rings, to inspire one and all.

Jack of the Union

porij — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:06:49 +0000

I have put this up as it entertains me and is the foundation of my point of view.

I have used Green, Blue and Red, to represent 3 dimensions, which sum together to produce the 4th that of ‘Light’.

This Octahedron (pyramid in reflection), is a model of non-physical reality, because of this I have made it with mirrors and defined it with colour.

Olympiad idea, animated

porij — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:44:56 +0000

Music track: born to fly. From album: Band of rain. www.andrewprince.net

April 14th #4.

porij — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:03:01 +0000

The final result was really cool when running, but now I had no idea, quite why the image ran the way it did. There is still some perimeters I’m adjusting, that i don’t quite understand, yet.

Overall, I have found playing with a looping sequence of code that displays as a moving image, extremely useful in learning the basics of how programs run and are made.

April 14th #3

porij — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:43:26 +0000

I have changed the shape to an ellipse, with color fill, followed by slightly smaller ones in different colors. Circles rotate (change to ellipses), until the violet one touches the screens edge. I have also allowed the ellipses to rotate 360 degrees and have started using negative numbers, instead of zero. Now strange and interesting things are starting to happen.

April 14th #2

porij — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:30:05 +0000

Here I have swapped the line for a rectangle, this wasn’t shrinking to the centre, as I’d expected, but towards the upper left corner.