This is something I made at the Pixelache summerschool August 2008 in Kemiö. Tuomo Tammenpää gave lovely solar power themed workshop at his place. This piece consists of two solar powered synths and one duck.

Here are couple mugshots of our heros:

First one is made following Tuomo’s instructions titled NandSynth goes Solar. It is built around Quad NAND Gate 4093 using three NAND gates on the chip. I tried to build it as small as possible. I am quite happy of the result. I tried to use one photoresistor on this one but it failed to make that much difference. I later replaced the resistor with one simple switch, which worked quite nicely. No pics for that version though as I allready gave both of these modules to my cousins.

Once I had built the first module I decided to built another one. That became my implementation of Ralf Scheiber’s solarsoundmodule. The design is using 74HC14 chip. This one also has one photo resistor that does something.

Couple of facts for those of you who wonder whether you should do this by yourselves: Parts for one cost around 3 euros. No experience in electronics required. Making the module to sound nice is a bit trial and error (you need to test different resistors and capacitors) but once you hit that spot, the outcome is quite nice. If you need more volume, just plug the module to your mixing table instead of that tiny piezo. Building one takes 1-4 hours depending on your soldering skills.

Sopeutujat is an episode of short animation series Luonnonlaki. I prepared a soundtrack for it. Everything else was done by animator/director Reetta Neittaanmäki. Animation premiered on YLE (Finnish national broadcasting company) in 2008.

Gimme Sugar is a gesture controlled sugar dispencer I made together with Anna Keune in 2007. The idea was - if I remember correctly - to sweeten a beverage or represent how much attention in form of sugar one gives to a significant other. By electronical means it is possible to separate the act of pouring the sugar from act of receiving it. At the other end user is pouring a sugar dispencer that has bunch of sensors (light sensors and an accelerometer). The values from the sensors are sent to the other end where sugar jar is dispencing sugar to the cup.

Super Ball is a large scale balloon installation I was working on together with Jenna Sutela and Martti Kalliala based on their concept. Their initial idea was to animate a super sized balloon taking three giant leaps in the night sky. Installation was made for Coachella festival 2008. However, hostile wind conditions at the location made the implementation of the original concept impossible and Jenna and Martti cleverly refactored the installation into Super Cluster. I´m hoping that in the future the installation can be displayed in the Super Ball form, which it was designed for.

Super Ball comprises of an Arduino powered Animator Unit that is controlling a network of 49 1-Wire LED-units, each attached to a balloon. Each balloon corresponds to a one frame of the whole 49 frame animation. I was responsible of building and programming The Animator Unit.

Video and images © 2008 Jenna Sutela