Skip to main content

Umbrella | Project Construction


The project, which has not been entitled yet, aims to construct a black umbrella that can be opened and closed autonomously. This umbrella opens and plays the song called “Katibim” when there is rain in Üsküdar. The song stops simultaneously with the closure of the umbrella when the rain stops. The size of the umbrella has been decided to be three times bigger than the usual personal umbrellas, since the relation between the installed object and where it has been placed has been taken into consideration, and it is meant to be a public umbrella that can cover many. The ready-made garden umbrella is bought yet its original plastic end tip will be replaced by hand made wooden one, and also a handle made of wood will be attached to that in order to present a huge version of an individual one rather than a garden umbrella. Additionally, the cloth of the umbrella will be modified accordingly.

Raspberry Pi, a small single-board computer, has been used in the project for the creation of an autonomous system. The program, which is written in Python, gets the weather data from weather API and issues a command to run a linear actuator which is placed alongside the shaft of the umbrella. The linear actuator, a piston-like motor that can go up and down at a constant speed, opens the umbrella by pushing it from its runner. There is an electronic component called a "relay" in between the Raspberry Pi output and a linear actuator, which operates the electric switches in order to make the actuator go for the intended direction, up or down. The Raspberry Pi, the speakers, the umbrella base which carries the weight will be hidden in the pedestal constructed for the umbrella.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Umbrella | Sexual References

The interpretation of an umbrella as an erotic symbol dates back to Greco-Roman god Bacchus and his followers called bacchantes. Since Bacchus’s cult was mainly associated with pleasure, rave, and ecstasy, the usage of the umbrella in different occasions like festivals or events by cult members assigned an erotic meaning to that object. Later its associations were generally made with royalty and wealth and this aspect has been forgotten. After a long time has passed, the character named Henrietta Petowker in Nicholas Nickleby was portrayed as “[she] knows that she is admired at the theatre by the jauntily phallic appearance of a most preserving umbrella in the upper boxes” by Charles Dickens, while he was pointing out the erotic perception of the object. Sixty years later Freud explains the relationship of umbrellas with the unconscious as such “all elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, umbrellas (on account of the opening, which might be likened to an erection), all sharp and elonga...

The Umbrella

The word umbrella derives from the Latin where “umbra” means shadow.    Similarly, “para” defines shelter or shield, and “sol” means sun and they construct the word “parasol” which is used with the term umbrella interchangeably, yet parasols have a straight shaft different than the curved handle of the umbrella. As their etymological roots suggest, the primal intention of creating this object was the protection from exposure to the sun around four millennia before today. The early materials used in the construction were the tree leaves and branches until the invention of paper in China. The paper predecessors of this object later oiled since then the function of them have expanded from sunshade to protection from the rain even though they were not totally waterproof. These oil-paper parasols as well as dry, silk parasols made their way to Europe around Renaissance and became a fashionable trend amongst women. In 1708 The Kersey’s Dictionary defined the umbrella as “a scre...

The Mirror Stage

I believe that cinema can be defined as an allegory of the mirror. This simile will not be built solely by focusing on the mirror scenes in the films but by comparing psychoanalytic aspects of both the cinema as an art form and the mirror. I will start with the emphasis on Lacan’s Mirror Stage since it is a formative theory about how the image of self is created before language and why it is crucial for a human being to function as a unified viable entity. Firstly, it can be claimed that humans are not born with an adequate number of instincts to make them conceptualize disparate bodily experiences. Therefore, the relation between the organism and its reality is needed to be established in order to differentiate the external and internal stimulants. In the mirror stage where the infants come across with their reflection, this “separation-individuation” is formed for the sake of ego subjectivity, since the baby observes its own body integrity in a full-length mirror. In the times that h...