Neeraj Dugar
From Wiki
Week 1
6th - 9th July
The course began with a discussion about our project and there were a lot of aspects that we weren't aware of from the start. We discussing the various kinds of pollutants when we found out that even light is a pollutant! Yashas showed us a video of the balloon sensors that he worked on and then explained how the sensors work.
We looked into David Dunn's Music, Language & Environment. We read about how he found out the major cause of forest fire. It was quite interesting reading about his experiment with trumpets in the Grand Canyon, and how music can be used as a language to communicate with the environment.
We worked on some basic processing and also tried to figure out how the Arduino board works. We made quite a few programs with which everyone had problems in the beginning, but after we figured it out it was quite simple.
Research:
Land Art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 60's and early 70's, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape, rather the landscape is the very means of their creation.
Pauline Oliveros is an accordionist and composer who was a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music.
Raymond Murray Schafer is a Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics.
Week 2
13th - 16th July
We were asked to read a few articles...
Links:
2. http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/pigeonblog.php
3. http://www.cseindia.org/campaign/apc/apc-index.htm
4. http://www.gobartimes.org/20090715/gt_covfeature.asp
5. http://www.cseindia.org/AboutUs/press_releases/press-20090722.htm
Victor showed us a few videos of projects that he was a part of. From that we got a vague idea about the possibilities of using the arduino board. We mananged to get our hands on breadboards later this week. I couldn't do much with it, others were trying to figure everything out, I couldn't exactly get it. Wires and electricals! not that good with it.
Week 3
20th - 23rd July
We started the week with a presentation made by Dusjagr about basics of electrical circuits and how they work. Later on we tried to put together circuits with him.
We went to CEMA for a DIY workshop. I landed up pretty late and Yashas told me that everything was over, but it wasn't! We had a really good time there with samosas, soft drinks and soldering irons. We made electronic music devices with sound, light motion sensors from scratch. Dusjagr had a really crazy device that he made(all of us were messing around with pretty unsuccessfully making some really horrific music). Dusjagr was the only one who could use it properly. Towards the end, when everyone finished making their devices, we gathered aroundand had a jamming session which was insane!
We met the scientists for the first time later this week. They told us how they came up with the idea of using pollution sensors(while having dinner with their wives!). All of us sat and had a discussion about what we were planning to do and the future of the course.
We decided to make our first prototype of a t-shirt with a red and blue LED with a gas sensor. The LED will be normally be blue and as soon as pollution is detected it will turn red.
Week 4
27th - 30th July
We had a Bioelectronix workshop which was pretty interesting as Dusjagr(not sure if I got the name right) showed us how to make a microscope by simply connecting any ordinary webcam to the computer and inverting the lens. We saw all kinds of living organisms which i didn't even know existed. Water bears are dam cool. We even managed to look at the pixels on the monitor.
I found an old fascination... LEGO! Yashas gave us the freedom to make use of it in any way possible. I really wanted to make something with it as I was seeing it after such a long time. Rohan had already made a microscope stand so I decided to sit and make something I used to make when when i was a kid... cars! It was a lot of fun... took some time off work!
Later this week all of us sat and discussed what our final projects are going to be. Our group decided to make the T-Shirt with LED's which are in the form of lungs which crumple as the LED's change colour as pollution is detected. Personally i think that we can do the LED part but the crumpling part seems a little complicated and over our heads. The idea is kickass but lets see if we can actually make it. That would be great.
Week 5, 6 & 7
3rd - 20th August
We started the week with a discussion with Rustom. He gave us some directions on work and asked us to be more specific which would help in being more effective in the need to identify the right audience. We divided ourselves based on what we want to work on specifically. We chose which groups we wanted to be in and started making sketches on what the final product/project would look like. We started making our prototype. Started to make the LED T-Shirt some time back, going dam slow... programming is a pain, too many loose connections! Still working on that.
Still wondering how to do the crumpling of the lungs. Magnetic field? Motors?
The T-Shirt finally started working. I put up a few images:
The blue LED's are always lit up, till the time that it is powered, and it turns red when pollution is detected.
We had a review with Rustom and Victor. They like our concept a lot but weren't very pleased with the visualization part of it(that was because we hadn't done any visualization! it was just the technical part that we had finished). So basically now we have to start the visualization.
Week 8
24th - 27th August
I started helping in the other projects as well. We made a prototype of the 'O2 Pump' with sunboard. Sat and cut out the whole dam thing. Putting them together was pretty easy as it took just about 5mins. Stuck it with fevi-kwik, lets see how long it lasts(hopefully till the end of the course). The final thing will be installed in a gas pump and it will give out oxygen to all the customers, atleast thats what we are hoping for.
Back to the t-shirt... not enough LED's! Need to figure something out.
We thought of screen printing on the t-shirt and behind that we can have the LED's just hi-lighting the lungs in some areas. Thats all the LED's we have, need more.
Tried working with EL wire but soon found out that we have the EL wire but not the driver. It's also working out to be too expensive and on top of that it will take approximately 2 weeks for them to come down from the US, in 2 weeks the course will be over so no point. Still need to figure out what we exactly have to do with the limited set of LED's.
Week 9
31stAugust - 3rd September
We went to Brigade Road over the weekend for documentation. Surprisingly we found out that most people don't give a shit about pollution levels in the city and as a matter of fact even Global Warming! What is wrong with these people! Turned out to be a lot of fun as well while explaining to random people. Everyone had their own opinion while looking at us, for instance a guy thought that we were tripping on some psy shit! While we were explaining our concept to another family guy, Abrar disappeared with the lighter so we had to ask him to wait till I went and bought another one. The guy's wife was very impatient as she was not at all interested in what we were doing and was just asking him for money throughout(we caught on the camera... it wes hilarious). The last person we spoke to was a doctor. It was too good to watch her give a really long lecture to Dhruv as he was smoking a cigarette while explaining(basically he got canned! haha).
Instead of screen printing I sat and painted a whole t-shirt in the shape of lungs. came out to be pretty good but we haven't used it... yet. We managed to change a bit of the programming part. Now, instead of the LED's going straight from blue to red, it gradually transforms from green to yellow, orange and then red depending on the level of pollution. Looks pretty good.
Week 10
7th - 10th September
LAST WEEK OF THE COURSE! Longest one I've ever had!
We finished our final T-Shirt on monday. Sorted out all the loose connections but didn't do any screen printing. Instead we stitched black wire in the shape of lungs with the LED's lighting up inside.
Missed tuesday and most of wednesday because I was sick. I even missed the documentation in the city(shit! I so wanted to go for that). Hopefully we might go again for a final documentation. Lets see.
