Kinetic and Measurement Project Ideas

,

For the first half of the semester in Energy I will be creating two projects, one primary project on the topic of measuring energy and another shorter secondary project exploring kinetic energy.

My initial inspiration around the topic of kinetic energy involves measuring time. My two favorite time pieces at home are an old Waltham mechanical pocket watch I inherited from my great grandfather and an annual clock my husband and I were gifted at our wedding.

I would love to create a hybrid of the two: a very slow mechanical clock that rotates approximately once per year. I have seen some examples of simple wooden clocks and would like to find a method of using the cycle of a day to power the movement of a pendulum without any of the electrical brains that would involve counting time through a quartz crystal oscillator.

For the longer measurement project I am interested in measuring and breaking down my active and passive electricity usage at home then using that data to generate some info graphics. This past summer I purchased a few WiFi energy monitoring smart plugs and plan to make use of these to analyze active and passive (vampire) power use for all of the devices around my home to have a better sense of how my total electricity use accumulates.

Related Posts

Drain

, ,

Forces

This week in The Nature of Code I learned about techniques for simulating forces in P5.js using vectors and principles from physics. In brainstorming for this assignment the indie game LIMBO was a strong inspiration for the look and feel. Expanding on the in class demo of Gravitational Attraction I set out to write a […]

BR-Random-Walk-002

,

Vectors

This week we learned about vectors in P5.js which are useful for calculating position and movement values in 2D and 3D space. As practice I rewrote code from my previous Random Walk assignment to use vectors to store coordinates. I also restructured the code below to make use of a Tangle class to generate objects […]

Random Walk

,

Random Walk

For this first assignment in the Nature of Code course at ITP I created a P5.js sketch utilizing the noise function to paint on screen. Since the assignment was open ended I did some brainstorming to set on a few constraints. A Google search turned up this example of random walk art that I was […]

Font Resize
Contrast