Twelfth week of Electronics Media

Week 12 of Electronics Media has come to an end.  With it comes the end of Project 1 and starts the beginning of Project 2. Here is a recap of all the things that have happened this week.

On 3/25/25, we spent the entire day in the Carnegie Arts Building. We continued our Project 1 critiques from a week ago, and I was incredibly nervous as I believed my project would be met with awkward silence as the coding and the construction was nowhere near as complex as my peers. But I was pleasantly surprised with what everyone had to say for the project, and it was satisfying to see everyone understanding its themes. The class also discussed our thoughts behind the themes and details of the "Metal Performance" reading. I took notes based on the reading, and here is what I wrote down: 

Themes: 

  • Depiction of machines with human traits, emotions, or even sexuality, reflecting our growing integration with tech
  • Humans becoming more "mechanic" through prosthetics, AI augmentation or societal pressures
What is Metallic Camp?
  • Metallic: Physical substance an artist employs but also refers to the contemporary connotation within pop-music denoting as loud, aggressive and resistant expression
  • Camp: "Love and Unatural" of artifice exaggeration
    • Ex: Robotic Movements
  • Metallic Camp: A distant place or ideological grouping (as in a "base camp" or "the anti-war camp") where people share a position or affinity for their common belief/resistance in metal as symbolic of a desirable evolutionary process via cyborgism to ultimate mechanic embodiment
How are Robots or Machines portrayed?
  • Sexualization where performances like "Them Fucking Robots" (1988) and "Executive Machinery Intercourse" (1999) parody the idea of robotic sexuality while questioning the humanization of machines
  • Robots and nature where some performances depict machines in animalistic ways, merging the line between technology and nature
  • Perspectives on Cyborgs where some artists embrace the concept, others satirize or critique it as seen in the works of Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes


For 3/26/25, I used the day to perform the shift register lab and recorded some notes. Here is a recording of the lab:

Example 1:



Example 2:


Here is also some of the notes I've recorded:

What is a Shift Register?
  • A device that allows you to add more I/O pins to the Arduino (or the microcontroller) 
    • Ex: Original Famicom Nintendo controller used shift registers to gather button presses from the controller
    • Types:
      • SIPO (Serial In, Parallel Out): Useful for controlling a large number of outputs such as LEDs
      • PISO (Parallel In, Serial Out): Useful for gathering a large number of inputs such as buttons 
    • Most used: 75HC595

What is a 75HC595? (595)
  • A shift register that controls 8  different output pins with only 3 input pins
    • Achieves this through "Bit Shifting"
    • Has 2 8-bit registers ("memory containers")
      • Shift Register
      • Storage/Latch Register
    • Everytime the 595 receives a clock pulse, two things happen
      • The bits contained in the shift register are shifted to the left by one position; bit 0's value is pushed into bit 1's value, while bit 1's value is pushed into bit 2's and so on
      • Bit 0 in the shift register accepts the current value on the DATA pin; on the rising edge of the clock pulse, if the DATA pin is HIGH, 1 is pushed into the shift register, otherwise 0
        • Processes will continue as long as 75HC595 is clocked
    • When latch pin is enabled, contents of the shift register are copied to the storage/latch register; each bit of the latch register is linked to one of the IC's output pins QA - QH, as a result whenever the value in the storage register changes, output changes
 
  • VCC: power supply, must be connected to 5V
  • SER (Serial Input): Send data into the shift registr one bit at a time
  • RCLK (Register Clock/Latch): When the pin is pulled HIGH, the contents of the shift register are copied into the storage/latch register which eventually appears at the output, seen as the last step
  • SRCLR (Shift Register Clear): Allows us to reset the entire shift register, when the SRCLR pin is pulled to LOW, setting all the bits to 0
  • OE (Output Enable): An active low pin; when pulled HIGH, output pins are disabled (set to high impedence state), when pulled LOW, output pins function normally 
  • QA-QH: Output pins
  • QH': outputs bit 7s of the shift register, allowing you to daisy-chain the 75HC595; if you connect this pin to the SER pin of another 595s, and both ICs the same clock signal, they will behave as 1 IC with 16 outputs allowing you to daisy-chain infinitely

On 3/27/25, the class went back to the FAB building and took the time to discuss difficulties with the shift register lab, what project ideas we would be interested in, and discussed information concerning type of motors to use. Here are the notes I recorded for motors: 

What are the Pros and Cons of DC Motors?

  • Pros:
    • Easy to reverse/control
  • Cons
    • Really fast
    • Drains battery fast
    • Always in constant rotary motion
      • Hard to change rotary
        • Mechanisms to change rotary
          • Change (Translate) location of the movement
            • Involves pulleys and belts
          • Change type of movement
            • Changing rotary to reciprocal linear
              • Crank Slider
            • Changing rotary to intermittent rotary
              • Geneva Wheel

What are the Pros and Cons of Stepper Motors?
  • Pros: 
    • Moves toward a specific distance
    • Usually pretty powerful
  • Cons:
    • Harder to control
      • Needs a driver

What are the Pros and Cons of Servo Motors?
  • Pros:
    • Moves to a specific position
    • Will always reach its designated destination
  • Cons:
    • Noisy
    • Consumes a lot of current
    • Cannot be powered by the Arduino (will burn the Arduino out)

What are the Pros and Cons of AC Synchronous Motors?
  • Pros:
    • Very slow (Powerful)
    • Easy to find
  • Cons: 
    • Requires a plug/AC for power

What is the feature of DC Gear Head Motor?
  • Slower (More Powerful)

What is the features of Linear Actuator?
  • Very expensive
  • Used in sophisticated scenarios

What is the feature of a Solenoid?
  • Uses spring and electromagnets to transform energy into linear motion
What are the devices used to pause motors (from least fancy to most fancy)?
  1. DPDT relay (Direction)
  2. 5PST relay (power on/power off)
  3. Transistor (turn on/off)
    1. Also change amount of speed
  4. Motor Driver
  5. Motor Controller

This marks the end of the Twelfth week of Electronics Media. Looking forward to next week!

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