Electronics and Electrical Storms

Friday, August 5th, was an amazingly productive day!  It started out early in the morning with a quick urban hike to our first installation site, as part of the Choose Yer Own festival.  We needed to get a sense of the extent of the space and how to best set ourselves up for Friday evening.  We decided on a strategy and narrowed down our installation zone to ensure a good density of lights.

Next, we made our way to CBC Calgary headquarters to meet with Chris dela Torre to do a radio interview on Illuminated Landscapes.  We met with Chris, who led us to the studio where we did our interview.  As it was our first experience in a radio studio, Claudia and I were naturally very excited - so excited, in fact, that we totally forgot to take some pictures of us looking professional with our mikes and headphones.  Chris was super easy to talk with, and the interview went really well.  It aired on CBC Radio One the next morning as part of the Daybreak Alberta series.  Hopefully some of you out there in internet land caught it!

After late breakfast and a nap, we went for a brief shopping excursion to gather materials to prototype some new ideas before making our way up north to an important appointment with some of our collaborators.  At Solarbotics headquarters, we met with Ben and Andrew, two Protospace directors, and Dave and Jeremie, from Solarbotics, to hash out a plan to make electronic kits.  Visitors to our installations who want a bit more challenge will be able to put together electronic circuits to allow LEDs to blink at different rates and in different combinations, more realistically mimicking the action of fireflies.  We’re very excited about working with Solarbotics to put these together and having the amazing Protospace peeps out at the installations helping the public assemble these!  And thanks to these four guys for teaching Claudia and I so much about electronics in such a short period of time!

circuits 

This is what collaboration looks like.

Getting excited over electronics!

As luck would have it, sometime during our meeting, the storm of the century rolled in and made it impossible for us to leave Solarbotics headquarters for a little while, so we took the opportunity to look around and check out all the goodies they have “in the back.”  Turns out they have everything any maker or tinkerer would ever want, including a small shop, a rad laser cutter, and several other gadgets, not to mention a well-stocked supply of parts.  It was great to be around people who are so passionate about what they do.

shop

rad laser cutter

Claudia standing in front of a very large machine.

Post-storm, Claudia and I went to go grab some well-deserved and long-awaited dinner, but not before batting through what felt like winter traffic.  Gotta love August in Calgary!

hail 

Just another August in Calgary...

Alas, at the end of the day, a rainbow appeared.  A sign of good things to come?  We think so.