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Squeebleflörnk
Aug. 21st, 2009 10:29 amEt ees still not complete but behold....
SqueebleFlornk by ~dv-girl on deviantART
Sunday morning I decided I wanted to get a horn for my bike for Burning Man but not a regular horn, something silly. My idea was a squeaky rubber frog. I cycled to Toys R Us and found that they have no rubber animals, squeaky or not. I was sad.
So I went to the pet store a little ways away and browsed the dog toys. I found the blue squeebly creature and decided that with some painting and such, he'd make a pretty good horn. Then I saw the flörnkle, just laying there! THESE PITIFUL HUMANS! They were marketing it as a dog toy! The flörnkle, as I'm sure you know is the strange hammer-like thing attached to the rear of the ship. When tilted or shaken in different ways it makes a variety of sounds. Squeaks, quacks, moos, etc. I had to have it.
I went to the hardware store and picked up a spring and, using some pipe clamps and an old bicycle tube I already had, I mounted the flörnkle on the stem and to an anchor inside the tail and covered the spring with the inner tube so it would not damage the tail at high rates of flörnkulation.
The tail itself is simple press board with some structure behind it and an array of alternate flashing LEDs. Yellow and green.
The white whiskers at the ends of the handlebars are clusters of fiberopitcs connected to green LEDs to make light-up bicycle pom poms and the lizardlamp is flexible sculpy over my normal bicycle light.
On the front wheel you can see a single bright yellow LED SpokePOV. We're waiting on sensors to finish the other two. Stacey has modified them for me to run off a single bussed sensor and we're going to upgrade the EEPROM from 4K to 1M, then modify the software to handle the new paging. The end result will be that I will be able to run ~1000 frames of animation on the wheel of the bike when its in motion, though for BM, it's probably going to be still images only.
The spokePov cluster will be moved to the rear wheel and I"m just going to put a string of green and yellow flashing LEDs on the front wheel.
Most of the rest is just paint and rhinestones. Oh, and a couple of cheap plastic plates from Michaels that I modified.
The really cool part is that the entire tail attaches with a single quick-release and all the rest of the parts come on and off very easily as well so I can strip it down for storage/transport and re-assemble it in less than 10 minutes.
The spring is configured for the bumpiness of dirt on the playa and has been a little difficult to test around town but I've rode the bike about 10 miles with all the gear on it, jumping off curbs and hitting every pothole I could find and it seems to be pretty solid and deliver an amusing range of noises when its jarred. It just makes me laugh like an idiot and makes everyone who's seen it laugh or smile. Flörnkulation is a complete success!
Though it's also made me a rockstar to the neighbor's children. I can't go outside my apartment for five minutes without being swarmed and asked about my bike. Doh!
Also, I took the opportunity to upload a different photo of the forest panel of my Burning Man tent. It's still not fantastic and doesn't really capture it, but it's better than the previous photo.
Burning Man Tent - Fores Panel by ~dv-girl on deviantART
SqueebleFlornk by ~dv-girl on deviantART
Sunday morning I decided I wanted to get a horn for my bike for Burning Man but not a regular horn, something silly. My idea was a squeaky rubber frog. I cycled to Toys R Us and found that they have no rubber animals, squeaky or not. I was sad.
So I went to the pet store a little ways away and browsed the dog toys. I found the blue squeebly creature and decided that with some painting and such, he'd make a pretty good horn. Then I saw the flörnkle, just laying there! THESE PITIFUL HUMANS! They were marketing it as a dog toy! The flörnkle, as I'm sure you know is the strange hammer-like thing attached to the rear of the ship. When tilted or shaken in different ways it makes a variety of sounds. Squeaks, quacks, moos, etc. I had to have it.
I went to the hardware store and picked up a spring and, using some pipe clamps and an old bicycle tube I already had, I mounted the flörnkle on the stem and to an anchor inside the tail and covered the spring with the inner tube so it would not damage the tail at high rates of flörnkulation.
The tail itself is simple press board with some structure behind it and an array of alternate flashing LEDs. Yellow and green.
The white whiskers at the ends of the handlebars are clusters of fiberopitcs connected to green LEDs to make light-up bicycle pom poms and the lizardlamp is flexible sculpy over my normal bicycle light.
On the front wheel you can see a single bright yellow LED SpokePOV. We're waiting on sensors to finish the other two. Stacey has modified them for me to run off a single bussed sensor and we're going to upgrade the EEPROM from 4K to 1M, then modify the software to handle the new paging. The end result will be that I will be able to run ~1000 frames of animation on the wheel of the bike when its in motion, though for BM, it's probably going to be still images only.
The spokePov cluster will be moved to the rear wheel and I"m just going to put a string of green and yellow flashing LEDs on the front wheel.
Most of the rest is just paint and rhinestones. Oh, and a couple of cheap plastic plates from Michaels that I modified.
The really cool part is that the entire tail attaches with a single quick-release and all the rest of the parts come on and off very easily as well so I can strip it down for storage/transport and re-assemble it in less than 10 minutes.
The spring is configured for the bumpiness of dirt on the playa and has been a little difficult to test around town but I've rode the bike about 10 miles with all the gear on it, jumping off curbs and hitting every pothole I could find and it seems to be pretty solid and deliver an amusing range of noises when its jarred. It just makes me laugh like an idiot and makes everyone who's seen it laugh or smile. Flörnkulation is a complete success!
Though it's also made me a rockstar to the neighbor's children. I can't go outside my apartment for five minutes without being swarmed and asked about my bike. Doh!
Also, I took the opportunity to upload a different photo of the forest panel of my Burning Man tent. It's still not fantastic and doesn't really capture it, but it's better than the previous photo.
Burning Man Tent - Fores Panel by ~dv-girl on deviantART
