Prisme

During this summer, at the same time I built my workshop, I worked with my wife on an artistic project.

It’s a huge polyhedron made in a single piece of Oak on the saw mill. We called it the “Prisme”. This piece was exhibited during the summer in our region along with Anne’s other works. It served as a starting point for a workshop with the visitors.

More of this project can be found here : matieredeschoses.com/prisme/

Building my workshop

This year I builded my final workshop (I hope so ;-). It’s a 100 square meter wooden building covered with solar panels. Builded next to the sawmill, it contains all my woodworking machines and tools. I now have a good place to work effectively.

The foundations were made with the help of a friend of mine and the use of a Mecalac. Yes, this was the opportunity to swap my forklift for a Mecalac, an incredible machine.

I sawed all the wood and crafted the timber structure alone. The incredible machine allowed me to lift it also by myself.

I designed and installed the complete solar system on the building. If everything goes well, it will cover all the costs of the construction after about 15 years of electricity production.

Some news after one year of silence

Time goes so fast ! It’s already been over a year that I have not given some news here.

Since my last post, things have advanced again :

The 6 July of 2015, our second daughter came to life, the two sisters are happy together and we also !

Our big construction project is moving forward slowly but surely : the last year was most dedicated to the “longère’s” roofing.

My sawmill also grew, I now have a all terrain forklift (bought used an repaired by myself last winter), the saw got a shed over it (also built last winter) and more recently I got a sharpening machine to become more independent with the blades maintenance.
I also made a dedicated web site : http://boisduguidon.com/ and some business cards and flyers. It’s my own small business after all 😉

New life

​It has been a long time​ since​ ​I have written an​ything here. Sorry for that, I’am still alive 😉 but my life has changed a bit.

Since 2013,​ I am owner of an old mill in the Morvan (Burgundy)​. I​ am working a lot on it​ as it was ​​deserted for 60 years​ – ​everything has to be ​re​done : from ​top to bottom, and we have decided to do everything by oursel​ves.​
So I ​am experimenting a lot of new skills : driving my excavator to bury the electricity and water connections, felling 25m high poplars, carpentering a lot to redo all the roofings are just some of them.

​

O​ur daughter came to this world​ in 2013​. ​She is now one year old and seems happy to have this not​ so​ ​conventional life. ​We​ are so happy to see here grow up each day in what we hope to become​ the best place to spend her childhood.

And last but not least, I am changing my professional activity, leaving behind me the technical design and development for commercial projects​. I am completely diving into​ woodworking​.​​ I have​ ​started​ a sawmill at our new home. This is the very beginning and for now I will mainly saw wood for our roofings but I hope to quickly get clients and see this activity grow up.

However, I’ll try to maintain and show the interactive installations I made with Lab212. So if interested, you can still contact me for Stop-iT, Appel d’Air, Face to Face and Loup garou.

I will try to keep this site alive to relate personal projects and to share some news every now an​d​ then.

Up v2

About 4 years ago, I build this first version of Up for the FICAM festival in Meknes (Morocco). As I am more and more asked to exhibit this installation, I decided to rebuild it in a more robust and reliable way. This new version was shown for the first time in Paris at Forum des Images for the Tout petits Cinéma festival 2013.

Basically each step of a staircase is equipped with an infrared emitter and an ir receiver. When someone is putting his foot down on a step the ir beam is stopped and the receiver sends its new status to the main controller box. This box generates MIDI signals that can be played by any type of MIDI synth.

I completely revisited the technical aspect of the project: while in the first version, each of the 16 receivers sent their status through a dedicated wire (which ends up in quite a big cable in the end), now they each embed a small microcontroller (Attiny 45) and are daisy chained. This means that each sensor is sending its data over the SPI protocol to the next one until it has reached the main controller (Arduino). With this design, I ended up with only one 5-wires cable linking the sensors together.

Other improvements of this version are : solid plastic cases for the emitters and sensors, nice enclosing box for the main controller and better MIDI integration.

Anyone interested in exhibiting this installation for an event ? Contact lab212.

Some pictures of the build process:

Wooden toys for Christmas

Remember the wooden toy horses I made last year ? I decided to renew the experience of making DIY presents. Some Do Nothing Machines and simple marble skill games made out of ash wood. But also this answer dices made with my girlfriend (cypress wood).

This small presents have been well received and I still have some for birthdays…

Appel d’air

Lab212 were asked to design an exhibition for young children (2 to 4 years old) at Stereolux in Nantes. I worked with Pierre on his idea. Basically it’s a huge industrial fan that responds to your blow on a tiny pinwheel. It’s not a simple on/off interaction, the big fan reproduces exactly the same speed curve the user applied to the pinwheel.

I primarily worked on the technical aspect of the project. The big challenge was to drive the Altivar 3 phase frequency controller with an Arduino. I had a hard time to study the MODBUS / RS485 protocols and the Altivar documentation about MODBUS communication isn’t very DIY’er friendly…

The speed of the pinwheel is measured with an old ball mouse mechanism that sends it’s PS2 data to the Arduino (this part was easy thanks to all the libraries that exist). The Arduino on the other hand outputs the fan speed data through an RS233 – RS485 transceiver connected to the speed controller via an RJ45 cable. The Altivar also delivers enough power through the RJ45 connector to feed the Arduino and mouse board so we ended up with rather clean setup.

A dedicated website shows all the projects of this exhibition and you can read more about Appel d’air on Pierre’s website.

Wooden cabin prototype

This summer during my holidays in Ardèche I started a cabin project with my friend Fred. We designed and built a 9 square meter wooden isolated cabin. It’s intended to receive people even during winter.

Fred has a mobile saw mill and he debited all the Douglas pine wood for the project. We then started to build the structure and the outside cladding. Later we made the windows and the door in my workshop. The assembly on the client’s site took place last December under falling snow…

Next step will be to think about a more industrial way to build this cabins.

Here is a timelapse of the assembly on site.

Lab212’s installations through France

During October in a lot of cities of France a special event is taking place during one night. It’s called “Nuit Blanche” for sleepless night. It primarly took place in Paris in 2001. The goal of this event is to invest the city with a lot of artpieces that work well at night. Over the years, more and more cities in France have they own “Nuit Blanche” and this year Lab212 were invited in some of them all over France : Bordeaux, Metz, Amiens, La Motte Servolex…

Here are some pictures of the events I went to.

In Bordeaux I worked on Kikko’s project called Bruit de fond. It’s a probe that moves up and down a light according to the deepness of a lake measured with a sonar. While the probe is moving on the water surface, a camera is taking long exposure shots to reveal the lake bed as light lines. I worked on the mechanics and electronics of the project, machining and building a lot of parts of the probe.

Find out more on the dedicated website.

In La Motte Servolex, for their “Nuit de la Création”, Stop-it was exposed for the first time in its new version. Stop-it doesn’t require a drawn grid anymore to stick the post-its on since the grid is now video projected. This improvement sound simple but it brings a lot :
– the light is perfectly uniform and improves the color detection
– the grid is adjustable in size through the software
– we have a play head precisely showing what notes are being read
– and the installation is now way easier to carry around

The setup shown on this pictures looks a bit wobbly but in fact worked very well relative to the 2 hours of time I was given to install 🙂

Summer project: solid oak kitchen

This kitchen was planned since a long time, but I managed to free some time this last weeks to make it real. It’s designed to fit in my small parisian kitchen but also to be suitable for any futur kitchen. Made out of solid oak wood, I tried to build it with the most precision I could get with my tools.

The wood came rough sawn and I had to plane it on this small planner/jointer my father gave me. This tool came from an old combination wood working machine and I had to adapt a motor on in to use it independently.

To cut the tenons, I added a new mode on my Arduino controlled Jig that allow me to give in the tenon width and the offset of the first cut and then to cut them all with the same settings.