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05 November 2006

Construction draft 2

2006 11 05 construction dra1 375x281 Construction draft 2After thinking about the first draft a bit longer, I realized that it needs another ring in order to create a nice threedimensional shape. So the top view is based on a hexagon now.
In this draft, the steel wires are unrolled to both sides. This should work better for the symmetric change.



31 October 2006

Construction draft 1

2006 11 06 construction dra 375x281 Construction draft 1After I stopped researching for small helicopters, I went back to my first idea of shapeshifting. Ball-like-shaped objects are supposed to be able to change their size in all three dimensions. I want to avoid the use of pneumatics, so i’m going about a mechanical construction.

The construction is a simple wireframe model of a ball, to be covered with a soft extensible cloth. This is the first attempt for the underlying mechanics.



21 October 2006

German bird in india

2006 10 05 eagle india2.thumbnail German bird in indiaI just got back from my frist trip to India. I had only two weeks – a very intense, exciting experience.
I was great to see so many of the German national birds, the eagle, mingle in India. This picture was taken just by the road from Bangalore to Mysore. I posted many pictures from my first trip to India on Flickr.



21 October 2006

Significant birds

bird flock1 375x281 Significant birdsI took this picture a few days ago from the window of my appartment in Berlin. These bird seems to be able to do quite fancy things. Have a close look or click the picture to open the highres version.
This is one image i had in mind when i fixed the theme of my degree: “The iconic potential of computative design”. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Thought i’m not sure, if the birds are aware of that.



15 October 2006

Aviation Tests 1


As a straighforward approach, i got myself a simple model helicopter from Conrad called Gyrotor at the cost of 50 Euro, just to get an idea of what is possible with affordable helicopter technology. This toy is good fun indeed, but much too far away from what i expected. Granted, my navigation skill are surely not the best, but i can’t imagine this thing showing stable flight behaviour with automated remote control.I’m still waiting for a 150 Euro model to arrive, but i already ditched the idea of having several helicopters with swarm behaviour flying in space for the sake of saving me a lot of trouble.

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