My Tea Kettles
2008.08.23
DXArts470 Final – T Kettles from James Fallisgaard on Vimeo.
My tea kettles were developed as my final piece for Mechatronics 470, Summer Quarter 2008.My goal was to create a completely absurd experience for one or more observers/users based on recasting a familiar household object in an unexpected and unpredictable light. Three whistling tea kettles were rigged with Servo motors and Infrared motion sensors to detect human motion in front of them. Sensed motion activates specific routines based on how many people are interacting with the kettles at any one given time. With a single person being detected on the sensors, the kettles act in a “watched pot never boils” manner, with the activated kettle not whistling, but the other two reconfiguring to continue their piercing whistle. When two people are sensed, the activated kettles refrain from whistling as the third untriggered kettle taunts the audience by activating and deactivating its’ whistle. Eventually users discover that perhaps a third person is needed to get the kettles to stop whistling. Three people can eventually get the kettles to stop whistling (for about thirty seconds before they reset behavior), but only after the kettles perform some cascading waves of opening and closing as one last punishment (or reward) to the audience. Irony is found as the kettles combine some of the oldest technologies harnessed by man (steam power) with very modern microcontroller and computer programming technologies to still be something outside of the full control of human kind.An Arduino microcontroller board was programmed by me to carry out these functions. Arduino code is similar to C, you can download my working code: T_KettleVERSION5.zip.
Final Iteration
Paper clips, zip ties, and a Servo motor can bring life to any tea kettle.
Wiring somewhat hidden behind the stools the hot plates/kettles sit on.
This nearly-finished iteration faced many timing and mode-entry bugs that were fixed eventually in programming. The IR sensors used were tempermental and difficult throughout the entire project.
The first iteration for the kettles (basically pictured above) had a very different emphasis than my final build. I was originally thinking along the lines of the kettles being somehow musical, and controlled through video-based motion tracking. I planned on tuning the kettles, in accordance with my original inspiration for even the idea of tea kettles, Paul Pope‘s 100%.
BUT, this idea of a “symphony of crying, wailing tea kettles” was Pope’s vision, not my own.
So the projects emphasis and ‘point’ evolved. I instead imagined what if that annoying whistling sound that reminds you to run to the kitchen and turn the burner off was instead compounded by the addition of multiple other boiling kettles (is there ever a setting in which two of such kettles are boiling together?) with the ‘off’ switch taken out of your control. I also imagined putting this idea in a public place, like a modestly busy sidewalk in the middle of the day. How would people react to first hearing the whistling far off while walking to their lunch break and then seeing these kettles lined down the sidewalk, with a wave of lifted whistle spouts as the person walks by? Would the whistling be so annoying that people would ignore it and just briskly walk by? Would the site of all these red and black wires coming off of kitchen tea kettles be horrific enough to make people just cross the street? Or would someone just come along and break the entire display in anger? These were interesting ideas to me, and though the kettles aren’t at the point where they can be publicly displayed yet (response times are still too slow) this is a work in progress.
The first iteration also was driven by Puredata, which I found way to clunky to make any real progress in to behavior-wise.
The Pd patch pictured (and available for download T-KettlesPhase2.pd.zip ) does however reliably sense motion on either the left or right side of an input video camera feed and raise or lower a kettle’s lid accordingly.
OH, Also THANKS JOHN TODD FOR FILMING VIDEO!