A note for folks wandering in from the Dorkbot link: the root of this website at www.simreal.com is me! Also, this journal is mirrored on LiveJournal as ewiserss, and I'm on LiveJournal as MadSpark. Just FYI. I'll see if I can't create a better entry point for the dorkbot link for the next one.
Well, the Sound and Vibration demo, dressed in a Steampunk cloak of disreputability and branching off of Marvin Niebur's Rogue Bio-Mechanics, was a moderate success.
Nik and I worked up a fun story line talking about discoveries of grey goo and how it was a self-organizing amorphous creature, as a wrapper to show the effects of sound vibration in a corn-starch solution, a thick fluid (paint, really), graphite powder, and at the end, salt on a lovely Chladni plate that Nik made for the demo! The demos pretty much worked correctly, according to rehearsal, but some of the tech we put in place did not, mostly due to cosmological considerations.
Basically, it was too bright out for the carefully constructed projected images (e.g. slide show and video of the vibration, plus the shadow-creating flashlight) to work. So folks gathered around the table, maybe saw the vibrations, maybe saw the slideshow...
It was fun to set up, fun to do, and folks seemed to enjoy it. So it's all good!
If you are interested in sound and vibration, I have a few videos of my early experiments (I'm totally going to put the Chladni plate stuff up soon too) on YouTube; just look for EdwinWiseOne there.
Also, Google and YouTube for Cymatics and Chladni. My stuff is downright weak compared to some of the things out there (but strong compared to others; such is life).
I do need to create a better high-frequency driver for the demos, though; the ancient butchered speakers I am using just aren't up to the task.
I'm actually thinking of making museum-style demos of some of it; custom driver, clear box, the works, to go with the Robot Group's Sisyphusian ball-rolling machine.