Time
Final – Conveyor Belt Clock
The conveyor belt clock was not a total success, but more like a 1st draft! I had a crazy ride creating this clock – I destroyed 2 Arduinos and a motor driver 😐 and my motors never arrived in the mail. I also learned the hard way that this clock really will only really work if the structure is VERY precise. But I was able to get something.
The main inspiration for this clock was from a question that Jeff asked us in one of the first classes: If a meeting is on Wednesday and your boss says we need to push the meeting forward 2 days, what day would the meeting be on? This question is really interesting because about half of the class said Monday and half said Friday. This is a simple activity to show how people perceive time – If you said Monday you see time as something that moves through you, where if you said Friday you see time as something you move through.
I wanted to create a clock that was different from your standard round clock with hands on it. The meeting question made me realize that I see time as something that I move through – and in my mind I kind of image that I am on a sort of belt of time. So I thought the conveyor belt was a cool way to present the clock.
Another aspect of the conveyor belt clock I though was going to be interesting is that it would not be that easy to read or to tell the exact time. To use the clock you us know relatively what time. I thought about putting a marker on the clock to help indicate the time, but decided not to because of how not precise this version is, but it might be helpful for another version. I liked the idea of it not being so precise but because it is kind of the opposite of how we use time now. Most of us use our phones to tell time, which is as accurate as it gets for the general public. There are people, very smart dedicated people, who work really hard to maintain network time and keep it accurate. This clock adds a little bit more chaos and mystery into telling time 🙂
Something else that I realized was really interesting about the conveyor belt clock was depending on which way it is facing the hours or minutes is more “important” because they are on different planes.
Week 9
I am feeling a little lost on what to do for the final project. I know that I want to try to challenge myself and make something physical rather than making something in p5. But I am not entirely sure what that will look like yet.
I know I will need to use motors, which is intimidating to me but I am ready to take on the challenge. I met with Jeff during office hours yesterday to talk about idea for the final and it was helpful. We mostly talked about how to get my ideas flowing and maybe trying to prototype something. We talked about how I am interested in how there are these different things we use to control the time – like the atomic clock. An that is what everyones time is based off of. We also talked about maybe creating some kind of ticker clock – which sounds interesting to me too.
So I know I am going to make some sort of physical clock. That is not in a circle. Because Jeff and I talked about the shape and I know I don’t want to make a circular clock.
After going home and thinking about it for a while I did come up with an idea for a clock that uses stepper motors and belts.
Essentially there will be a thicker belt with all of the hours on it, and then a thinner belt with all of the minutes on it. And there will be two stepper motors, one controlling the minutes na done controlling the hours. I know I will also need gears and I am not sure what the belts will be made out of yet. So there is still a lot to figure out.
There are also two ways it can be set up (I tried to draw them in the picture above).
Week 7
Midterm
After all of the readings and digestion/discussions of the reading we have had about time so far, there are a few things that have stuck with me.
- In The Order of Time, Rovelli talks about the theory that time could be granular – how there could possibly be a smallest division of time, and therefore time is not continuous. This is very interesting and really makes me think. Because while we experience time in hours, minutes, and seconds, maybe even milliseconds, we read it as something that takes steps. But we experience it as something that is continuous and could be measure into infinitely small measurements.
- Also, in The Order of Time, there is mention of time only existing as a measure of change. Without change there is no time. In my personal experience on earth, I feel as though this is how I experience time. The seasons, the food going bad in my fridge, dust collecting in my apartment, my hair and finger nails growing, ect. these are all things that remind indicate to me that time has passed without looking at a calendar.
- I found the ‘The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time’, the New Yorker article about network time protocol very interesting. I never realized how much work it was to have all of our devices keep track of the same time. And so I never thought about how people had to come up with a way to make a network time, and maintain it. But it is extremely important and even has people fighting over how it should be done.
I know that time is measured by atomic clocks, but I do think about how those measurements were chosen. We all know, time can feel very different based on what you are doing. A minute of holding your breath under water probably feels a lot longer than a minute of you relaxing and watching a movie. Like they say, “time flys when you are having fun”.
Taking all of this into account for the final I wanted to create a clock that was based off of some type of data collection. My original idea was to set up a sensor in my room and have it collect data. I was running a bit low on time by time I decided on a project, so I decided to skip out of the act of collecting data.
Last semester I collected temperature data in my bedroom and kitchen for a week. And got outside weather data from the LaGuardia Airport weather station. The sensors were collecting data every 10 seconds, but the outside temperature was collected every 10 min, so the bedroom and kitchen data sets were cut to also only be every 10 min.
The idea was that the time would only change when the temperature changed. I used the rounded temperatures so they were whole numbers and not decimals because I thought that would show less change, and most of the time when we read temperature it is a whole number.
Since I had three sets of data, I made three different “clocks”. The top one is the bedroom temperatures, middle is kitchen temperatures and bottom is outside. A line is drawn every time the rounded temperature changes by 1 degree. So the places where There is not a line means the temperature was the same.
The lines in these clocks also represent “minutes” and when the temperature is not changing, time is not changing. I think this plays a lot with the idea of time being granular and time only existing when there is change.
Because all of the temperatures are changing different times and frequencies, the times are all different. And because temperature changes are linear the times will pause for a while or move really fast.
I think this also ties into the idea of keeping time for the whole world or the whole network, like atomic clock and the network clock. It shows how easy is is for time to be different in different places, and how hard it is to get them to be the same.
Right now the data is being looped through based on the frame rate, which kind of defeats the purpose of this whole clock. Because it is moving through the dataset at a linear rate. To improve on this it would be better to have it all happening live. Have the temperature data be collecting and when the actual temperature changes then the clock will change. I think this would be a lot more powerful and interesting rather than using past data.
If the clock were running live for a really long time it could be interesting to relate it to days and years too.
I think there is still a lot to think about here and a lot more to improve upon.
Week 6
Seeing Time
I have made a time lapse clock. When the sketch first starts the screen is very clean and empty, but as time goes on the seconds, minutes, and hours that have already passed remain as part of the background.
The seconds travel down the screen in a sine wave, it takes one second from the top to the bottom. The minutes are in red, they travel from top to bottom in 1 minute and follow a quinticOut ease. I chose this because sometimes I feel like minutes can pass by really fast or really slow. so they start out moving fast and end slow. The hours are yellow in the pm and blue in the am. and they move across the screen. It takes 1 hour the number to move from the left to the right, but they are following bounceOut ease so they bounce around towards the end of the hour. I feel like the second half of the hour always feels more chaotic to me.
The screen starts to get really full and has only streaks of black, red, and yellow or blue.
I find it really interesting to have the clock going, but leave the tab because it pauses the drawing of the seconds, minutes, and hours. Leaving really interesting gaps in the screen. Which I feel like correlates really well with time and time lapse – if there is nothing/no one there to capture the time then it won’t exist.
I also found it really fun to experiment with different function to get a completely different look to the time lapse.
I think these are all really interesting because they all produce a pretty different feel.
If I had more time I would experiment with even more easing functions. I also think it would be cool if I added in a way to change the easing functions with a mouse or key press. I can definitely do this pretty easily.
I also think it would be interesting to experiment more with the transparency of the background, right now it has an alpha of 5. I chose this because after putting a few values in I thought 5 was the best. But this could also be an interesting value to have change with time
Here is a video of the minute + of the clock after starting:
After letting the sketches run on my computer all night I go some interesting time lapses. The sketch pauses when the computer sleeps, which makes sense, but it is interesting because it reflects when I was on my computer.
Also, I was able to add in key presses to change the easing functions, here.
‘s’ controls seconds
‘m’ controls minutes
‘h’ controls hours
It is only really immediately apparent when that the function changes for the seconds, but I think it could be interesting to see how the functions would change the look of the time lapse over longer periods of time.
Week 5
Seeing Time – Plan
I have been playing around a lot with videos and p5.func. I originally wanted to get a time lapse with variables that follow different ease functions. To get started I decided I would use time variables to start because they would change easily on their own, and this is time 🙂
I plan to add more variables like minutes and hours and have them follow different easing functions that also move across the screen at the time increment they represent.
Week 4
Clock
So unfortunately my vision for my clock did not turn out the way I wanted it to. I was planning on having a bunch of different videos playing at different speeds and to have slit scans indicate the current hour, min, and second.
The first problem I encountered was that I tried to load in 132 (12+60+60) videos and play them all at different random speeds. This was causing so much lag that I had to bag that idea. So instead I loaded 3 videos and had them all cropped slightly different. This was able to cause a similar effect, but not ideal. Then, when I tried to add in the slit scans, it didn’t look great and was very hard to understand (just like I had predicted). I also wanted the slit scans to take the same amount of time the measure it was indicating – the hour slit scan would take an hour, minute would take a minute, and second would take a second. This proved to be harder than I though and made it even harder to read. So instead I came up with this video clock.
It looks cool but I am not as excited about it. So, I decided maybe I can play with the same idea as the slit scans but use solid rectangles.
I went back to my clock from last week. I added numbers for readability and the current time rectangles are “revealed” by the black rectangle.
I also wanted to explore with the p5.func library, so I decided to incorporate that into my clock as the seconds. In my class Feeling Patters, we also talked about p5.fun and there was this demo sketch that was used to explain the movements of each function by bouncing a circle from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. So I took this code and used it for the seconds in my clock. Each time the square bounces from bottom to top and back is 1 second. And if you would like to change the way it moves, you can press the arrow key and it will follow a new function.
I think the p5.func library is really cool. I still am trying to understand how the code I use here for the seconds works to flip through each function. But I think it adds a nice element to the clock.
If I had more time to work on my clock I would many have the seconds square x position also move based on a function. And I would like to add color to indicate am and pm, or possibly just flip the back and white for am and pm.
Week 3
I feel like there is a lot of overlap of ideas in my Feeling Patterns class and this class. In feeling patterns we talk about patterns that we observe in our lives and the nature of patterns. How they repeat or diverge, and how time can play a huge part in a pattern.
In Feeling patters this week we looked at creating slit scans with p5.js. Slit scans are so cool and I wanted to incorporate slit scans and videos into my clock.
Inspiration:
Time Stretcher and It’s About Time 2
The Fourth Dimension (I haven’t watched it yet but saw stills from it and it looks awesome)
I am also very interested in the fact that time is moving is every direction all of the time. I also find it interesting how time could be granular (I really like this part of The Order of Time) and eventually can not be broken into a smaller chunk of time. In class we talked about how time and keeping time constrain us. For my clock I think the use of videos and slit scans will kind of be a play on these ideas.
So, I created an outline for my clock. It is not very traditional and it is hard to read, but that is not the point.
On the far left there are 12 bars that represent hours. To the right of that there are squares that represent minutes. And on the far right are the seconds. Right now the black bars indicate the time, so in the picture above it is 9:28:01 (hh:mm:ss).
Now that my clock is working properly, I would like to incorporate videos. My plan is to have each rectangle have a video playing in it at different speeds, like in the Sled and Crossing the Hudson examples. I originally thought it would be cool to have 12 different videos, but I will have to see how it looks because that might be too chaotic. Instead might just have 3 different videos – one for hours, minutes and seconds. Then, instead of having the rectangle be black to indicate the time, I will have the rectangle be a slit scan to indicate the time.
Clocks help us keep time but they also freeze us in time for a period of time. Depending on how precise a clock is you could be frozen in the minute 21 for a minute or in the hour 3 for an hour. This is how I want it to feel when looking at the clock. The videos for the non indicated time will be moving, just like how time moves, but the indicating rectangles will be slit scans and will be sort of “freezing” time.
Week 2
I started off creating my flubber inspired sundial out of resin by mixing some yellow resin and pouring it onto a silicon mat, using the hour lines I drew out on paper as a guide. I was not exactly sure how I wanted the shape of my sundial to turn out, but I knew I wanted it to be very organic and blob like. Once I started pouring the resin I found myself making blob lines about the guide hour lines. This resulted in a sort of spider web like blob, which I liked. I was worried that the webs of resin would run together as it dried. I observed the drying resin making slight changes to it for about an hour and then I decided I would let it do it’s thing.
I also decided to pour a big blob of blue resin to represent the night on the sundial. I originally wanted my resin sundial to be quite big, but I only had two small silicon mats for the resin to dry on, so I decided to add the blue blob to make the sundial larger.
Then I had to wait for it to dry.
Unfortunately, as the resin dried some to the webs merged together, but it was not too bad. I needed to add markings anyways so I figured it would be okay.
I used silver wire to mark down the hour lines and add numbers to indicate each hour. I also then added small tick marks on the hour line and even smaller tick marks to indicate the 1/2 hour lines. I then wrapped the wire around 4 pieces of the wire to create the gnomon and glued it to the center of the sundial.
After the glue dries for the attachment of the gnomon. The angle was set to 40.7 degrees (apporximately!!) and pointed it to the north. And then hope that it works…
I know all the math is correct but for some reason my faith in its ability to work is not 100% there. Maybe it is because the resin and glued on hour marks and gnomon are not totally accurate, but that is also okay. It could also be because I have never made a sundial or seen someone make it. My entire life I have had and clock available to tell me the time.
Anyways I took it outside and believe it or not, it worked!!
I definitely see how precision is super important in making a sundial. The materials I chose to use for my sundial are not great for creating precise objects. But I am happy to see it works!
The only thing I was not able to do was capture a Timelapse of my sundial because I didn’t have anything to hold my phone, but I plan to do that later 🙂
Week 1
Sundials!
Wow Sundials! Sundials are honestly really cool.
I was excited when I heard that we would have to make our own sundials. They are historical and iconic. My summer brain was honestly a little bit intimated because I had no creative juices flowing. But after doing some research and looking more into the different types of sundials, I realized how iconic they really are – McDonalds even made an ad that was a sundial for their breakfast menu:
After doing some more research on how to make a sundial, it seemed like most of the sundial tutorials were for kids. Which is fine, but as fun as it is to make one by making marks every hour around a “stick” (Gnomon), I wanted to understand how to mathematically create a sundial.
How would I know what angle to put the Gnomon?
How far apart should my hour marks be?
I knew the answer to these questions had to do with my location on the earth and i wanted to use some trigonometry to figure it out. For creating a sundial mathematically, sundials.org and The Mathematics of Sundials were both very helpful.
For a horizontal sundial, like you can find in gardens, the gnomon is to be at the angle of the latitude of the sundials location, and the dial lines can be calculated by using this equation:
tan(theta) = tan(HA) x sin(lat)
theta: degree of angle measure away from 12pm (which is directly north). HA: is the hour angle of the sun from 12pm, 15 degrees for every hour (negative before noon and positive after noon). lat: the latitude of the location of the sundail
Fortunately I did not have to calculate all of these on my own, sundials.org, did that for me.
So with this information I created a rough paper draft for all of my dial lines for a horizontal sundial.
My plan with this is then to create a sundial using resin. I am still not sure if I want to make a vertical or horizontal sundial, but I think I want it to kind of look like Flubber.
Like green a slimey ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wanted the sundial to seem a little more organic and fun. I understand that for a sundial to work properly there requires a lot of precision, but I like the idea of the sundial to look a little chaotic.
There is a glass artist, Silje Lindrup, who makes really fun glass pieces. They also make these really fun glass clocks, that I can’t stop thinking about. I like how cute and fun they are, so I also think this is where I am getting some of my inspiration for my blob resin sundial.
GracyW 