March 2012

Flower

A Robot Named Flower

This is the first robot I made while attending SAIC in Chicago. It was the project which got my feet wet and ultimate caused me to fall in love with electronics and fabrication. I had never used any shop tools before or even touched a soldering iron for that matter. I came a long way in four months from literally knowing nothing to programming, engineering, and building a working robot from raw materials. This little drawing to the left was the first concept sketch I proposed to my professor. I called this robot ‘Flower’ and aimed to have wire pulleys powered by two servo motors tug its spring body in the direction of any onlooker its sonar sensor could pick up in the vicinity. In addition to leaning, I wanted the light bulb on top to glow and dim according to how close people came to it. The flower was…

General Stuff

And so it begins

I suppose I should begin by introducing myself. Well, I am Sarah, a student from Las Vegas, Nevada with a long history in visual arts. For the past decade I’ve been sharpening my skills as a painter, digital illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor from my beginning days in high school at the Las Vegas Academy of Performing and Visual Arts, all the way to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that I made the leap from the more tradition mediums to the realm of art technology and began thinking I was more of an engineer than just an artist or designer. I don’t have much background in programming languages, circuit building, or metal fabrication, but I did pick up some basic skills in Chicago at SAIC in their Art Tech program. If I had stayed there it would have been to continue down that path. Even though…