Embedded - 314: Why Are Wings Needed in Space? (Repeat)

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

Mohit Bhoite makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art. Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables. Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics. Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow). Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers Mohit can be found on twitter as @MohitBhoite

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White. I'm here with Christopher White. Our guest is Mohit Boite, and he is in studio. We are going to talk about flux, sculpture, and circuits and this cute little LED light temperature thing that's sitting in front of me. I'm quite excited. Hi Mohit, welcome. Thank you for hosting me. Could you tell us about yourself? My name is Mohit. I am a senior hardware engineer at Particle based out of San Francisco. So my day job is to build electronic circuits, flagship products for Particle based out of San Francisco. So my day job is to build electronic circuits, flagship products for Particle. And in my free time, I like to build things. And one of the things that I like to build are free-form circuit sculptures that are primarily made out of passive electronic components and brass wire.

Why do you do this? I mean, you do electronics during the day, but you also do it after work? Yes. And it's funny because my day job is literally designing circuit boards all day long. And then I come back home and I still have this desire to be building things with hands. And building could mean cooking or it could mean soldering things together or it could mean bending brass and making sculptures out of them. And the reason why I do that is because it's a way for me to unwind from a day. It's very relaxing, almost therapeutic to be building circuits, even if it's at the end of the day. So during the day, you build circuits with circuit boards, and at the end of the day, you build circuits without circuit boards. Precisely. All right, we have a lightning round where we'll ask you short questions

and we want short answers. And if we are behaving ourselves, we won't say why and how. Are you sure? Chris, you want to get started? What's your favorite flux? Favorite flux. It's a flux made by CircuitWorks and it's a flux pen. It's a water-soluble flux.

It's very easy to use and apply. If I remember correctly, the part number is CW8013, or maybe not. I'll have to look up. It's a cool little pen that dispenses flux on demand. Your favorite gauge of wire? 18. How much would it cost to commission the Millennium Falcon? Too much.

Your favorite material of wire? Material? I would still stick to brass. Lead or lead-free? Lead-free, all the way. Favorite pliers? They are made by Zuron. I forget the part number. They're flat-nose, needle-nose pliers.

Favorite fictional robot? Oh, yeah. The robot from Short Circuit. Oh, yeah. What was his name? Johnny Five. Johnny Five, yes. Johnny Five.

Do you have a tip everyone should know? Clean your workspace with a lint roller. If you have a soldering mat that is made of silicone, lint rollers really help you clean that up. I'm going to take that. Yeah, apparently we're going to go get lint rollers. Okay, so... You win. You win, yeah. Yeah. Apparently we're going to go get lint rollers. Okay. So. You win.

You win. Yeah. Congratulations. Very good. You do circuits without circuit boards, which means you make sculptures. How did you get started doing this? Describe for people who can't see anything. All right.

What these look like. So let's rewind the clock all the way back to 1998. That was a good year. Yes, it was. I had recently been introduced to the internet. This was me growing up in the city of Mumbai in India. And my dad had access to internet from his office because he used to work for the government. And I had, you know, read an article in Reader's Digest, believe it or not, back in India

about this person called Mark Tilden, who would make robots out of broken Walkman players and CD players and gadgets that were broken. And that was perfect for me because I did not have access to electronics or an electronics market, but I did have access to broken electronics or knew how to break electronics. And so... Everybody knows how to break electronics.

And so this was like a match made in heaven. And I wanted to know more. And I don't even remember what surgeon I used, probably Yahoo, and came upon this website called solarbotics.net and it was just a forum of people talking about this concept of beam robotics and beam is an acronym for b-e-a-m b is biology e is electronics a is aesthetics and m is mechanics and so this philosophy of building robots out of passive, broken electronic components and putting them together so that they exhibit complex behaviors.

And one of the complex behavior is, you know, you put a solar cell with like two light sensors on it and two motors. And this now bug, so-called photo war, will chase the light and feed off of the light and run away from the dark. And so the idea is you build these things using just what they call as dead bug soldering. And the idea is instead of using a circuit board, you use wires or direct connection between two electronic components. Thus not having the necessity to design a complicated and expensive circuit board. You just start connecting things together like Lego, but instead of plugging them in, you solder them together. And that's how I started actually learning about electronics and how to freeform solder. There's another word,

freeform, dead bug, fly wire, and just the method of connecting two things together without having to use a circuit board. Traditionally, in electronics, you have flat circuit boards, either made of phenolic or fiberglass material. And there are copper traces that run on the circuit board that connect two electronic components together with a copper trace. And the idea in freeform is you get rid of the circuit board and just connect those two things together with wire or copper or brass, as I found out later in my career, that also works. So Beam was my foray into electronics.

And then I took up engineering in electronics and telecommunications. Then I did a master's in robotics I've always been a fan of robots in general I wanted to go to Japan to study robotics but I ended up in the United States which I think was better for me the idea so I you know have been building these things and there was one afternoon that I still distinctly remember walking into Ace Hardware. I don't remember what I was buying, but came across this whole section of extruded brass parts, like extruded brass rods, tubes, C extrusions. And I was like, huh, I could actually use this in circuits. I don't really know how and why, but it just clicked.

And I bought some brass rods, took it home and started playing with the idea of hooking up the particle photon, which is a Wi-Fi enabled dev board to a seven segment display. And instead of using wires or making that on a PCB, I decided to start using brass as a structural element and also a connection element. I drew some sketches and put it together and it was working in the first instance. And I posted a picture on Instagram, which was later picked up by Hackaday. And they wrote an article about it and people were like, oh, this is cool. And like most forums, people were encouraging and there were also people noticing my cold solder joints. If it works, they're not that cold. Exactly. And so it went back into my drawer and then a couple of years later, I really wanted to get back into it. And I started sketching out these ideas in a logbook that I have.

And it's just like getting bigger by the day. And just like working with different shapes and forms, different devices, and not getting too purist as to not use circuit boards at all. Circuit boards have their place. If you're working with tiny, tiny electronic components, if you want a tiny radio on it, you still need a circuit board. But the idea was not to just do away with circuit boards. It was trying to find a happy balance between using brass as the interconnects, circuit boards as the main functional unit and then displays.

And I was also inspired by a German artist. His name is Peter Vogel. And he made beautiful, beautiful free-form sculptures, primarily to make sound and music. And he was very prolific in the 80s and 90s. And so that combined with my love for electronics and robots is where i stand today making all kinds of circuit sculptures that tell you time tell you temperature draw with light or just do nothing and stand on your desk and blink an led i there are so many things i want to ask um Let's go back to the beam part, because I was totally new to that, but it's a pretty big movement where you have this, there's the whole beam part, which you said, but there's also the tenets of that whole group, which is to use the lowest number of electronic elements, to keep it simple, to recycle and reuse the technology scrap, and then to use solar power as much as possible.

True. And you came across this pretty early, but it sounds like there were years where you didn't do the sculptures. True. Why? Because I was, I would say, distracted by other things. Robots? Robots in particular, yes. So sculptures is just one of the things I like to do.

And somehow I got traction on Instagram when I started posting these. But my history with electronics is not just about sculptures. I have, I also have a ham radio license and I used to like building radios. And as a, like a project for my undergrad, I made a small, like 20 meter transceiver. I did not have a license to transmit, but I still built one. It worked. I was able to get broadcasting all the way from Russia into India. It was pretty fascinating.

Just being able to just tune into radio frequencies that are, you know, omnipresent all around you at all times, just waiting to be heard. So ham radio was a fascinating aspect that I was also exploring in those years. Robotics was another, just playing with electronics in general. Drawing, I wanted to become an artist. A five-year-old Mohit wasid was asked like what would you want to do i was like i want to draw all day so i have i feel like i have had these micro obsessions all throughout my life be it electronics robotics beam art world and so yeah i've dabbled with a lot but as far as sculptures go they come and go and i think now they're here to stay. Just because I have found attraction and I like building things. And this feels like a good combination of being able to have art meet engineering. You mentioned that one of them was picked up on Hackaday and that there was a lot of encouragement,

but there was a little bit of discouragement and it went back in the drawer. There was a lot of encouragement. Why didn't you listen to that part? I mean, you know, humans are interesting in the way they would somehow completely tune out encouragement and just focus on criticism somehow. I don't know why and how. And you latch onto it. Do you wish you could go back and tell yourself, look, stop that. It doesn't matter. So what if there are cold solder joints? Let's just make pretty things. Totally. And I think I am also a huge critic of myself. So until I get everything perfectly right, and I'm not ready to present it to the world now

because I feel like, you know, there are more eyes, more eyeballs on your work once you find traction. And it becomes even more difficult to be vulnerable to showcasing your work. And I think I struggled with that in and out, but now I just build things because they make me happy, regardless of what people think or what they are. That's a tough place to get to. Yes, extremely tough.

It's a tough place to stay, too, but you know, you a certain level of public popularity and then you achieve enlightenment like you have now and then suddenly something takes off even bigger probably re-enter that state right true and i feel it's part of growing up you know um and it comes to you i don't think i was chasing this this uh place where i just do things because i want to do things um it just so happened to me that I feel comfortable. And I don't know how and why that happened, but it just happened. It's a good place to be. So how much of your sculptures are hardware versus software?

We talked about making electronics without boards, but there are software elements, aren't there? So yeah, I have sculptures that talk to the internet i have sculptures that are made out of passive electronic components that just blink so no programming involved and i would say they are 50 50 and so the ones that have a tiny microcontroller on it i would say you know the programming is the 50% of the sculpture because otherwise it's just a standing structure with nothing happening. So the idea that you fetch time from the internet and display it or fetch weather from the weather station and display it or just measure the temperature in your room and then log it into a cloud database. So there are programming aspects, but what people see is just the physical manifestation of the code that you write, in a way.

Do you start with a structure in mind? It's like, okay, I want to make this airplane-like thing or this bug-like thing. And then think, okay, what could that do? Or does it go the other way? Well, I want to make, like you said, a weather monitor, and that should look like a little cloud or something. That's actually a good idea. I have gone back and forth, but I think it's the latter, where what I try to do is constrain a sculpture to a theme. So I would say, I want to build Star Wars-inspired sculptures, spaceships-inspired sculptures, and then I will put myself to the constraint and, you know, just doodle. And then it's funny because when I am doodling, I will have a box full of

electronics sitting in front of me and I would just, you know know put things together with hands to see what fits and what doesn't and then doodle the sketch and then keep on doing that within that the constraint of say making a spaceship I will do that same thing with uh there's another series that I do is called handle with care and uh I had these measuring cups and they had wooden handles and the measuring cups were you know losing their i think plastic coating they were just bad measuring cups and so i took off the wooden handle i asked myself like can i build electronics at the end of this handle and i started the series called handle with care where there's this free-form sculpture at the end of the handle. And what could you do if you were given a handle?

So I made a tiny gaming console, like you hold on to the stick with a joystick at the end, and there's a free-form LED matrix. So it's like an old snake game that used to be on Nokia cell phones. The other sculpture I made was just a flashlight, but the flashlight could be programmed to have different patterns, different brightness. And I have more ideas because I have six measuring handles and I have done two. And so just being able to constrain yourself to certain styles and themes helps me doodle and come up with ideas rather than just drawing sketches out of thin air. Yeah, the blank page is a scary place. It is.

And it's also interesting that I like doing just drawing and technical drawings and schematics. And it's nice to be able to start drawing faces and know I could actually put electronics inside of it. And it's like building toys. And you don't use something like CAD to completely map out your 3D structure? Not completely.

Maybe sometimes to check out the proportions to see what works and what doesn't. If I'm using a complicated schematic, I will still a complicated schematic, I will still use a schematic capture software, usually Eagle, EagleCat to draw the schematic and then use that as a template to make the sculpture. Do you draw out the wires in Eagle like you create them on your sculpture? Or do you just have Eagle show the nets the connections sometimes both i have sculptures that literally look like they were circuit boards but without

the the fiberglass board that you know holds it together but as far as Eagle goes, I use that to usually draw the schematic and then use that to make a PCB. But where you see the copper traces, they're all brass. So yes, you know, being able to use the PCB design tool to make sculptures is possible. But when you enter the realm of complicated three-dimensional structures, then I tend to use just pen and paper or sometimes use Fusion 360 to get the boxes and the angles right. How many drawings would you do for something of the complexity of your TIE fighter alarm clock i would say that particular one it's funny because i drew so many sketches and no none of the sketches look like the one that's sitting on our desk here just because as the as you draw wait a minute that's an x-wing yes no it's not a tie fighter it's a tie interceptor i've just been star wars you have another one yes okay yes sorry i on your website i was looking at

the other one. Yes. Yes. That was a TIE fighter. And this is a TIE interceptor. The TIE fighter, unfortunately. What's the difference between a TIE? You see, one is a long-range interception, interdiction aircraft or spacecraft. I have no idea.

One looks cool and one looks less cool. And I think the Tri-Fighter, the version that I built, was the one that was flown by Darth Vader versus the others. Yeah, see, they had to make a different one for that movie so you knew which ship Darth Vader was in. So that's why they gave him the Kirk lens. The little edges on edges on the yeah yeah it looked like his wings didn't fully expand yeah this is so not where i intended where i intended but that's but that's the uh the product of you know constraining your things to a theme and so this is the second in the series of bedside clocks. The TIE fighter,

on the other hand, sadly broke as we were moving boxes from Minneapolis to San Francisco recently. But you're going to fix it, right? Yeah, of course. And surprisingly, the air here in California, the salty air, is a little bit more harsh on the brass than it was back in Minneapolis. So the brass does get tarnished fairly quickly here. I mean, you could use that. Yeah.

Like having to, yeah. The patina does add a character to the sculptures. Yes. Okay. Sorry. My question was how many drawings did they get? About a dozen drawings, and I had so many more plans as far as what the sculpture would do or look like. And then as you get closer to the day when you're actually putting things together, you start eliminating things that seem redundant or too complicated or aesthetically not pleasing.

And so usually my sculptures end up the filtered down version of what a doodle looks like. But I would say about a dozen different concepts to get to one. And how many builds do you do? Is it just one? Just one, yeah. Okay, so you're not making the same thing 10 times and then only and then junking nine of them. No, I would not be a happy person if I were to do that. But you achieve some pretty good precision. Like I'm looking at the tie interceptor

and the angles are all consistent with all the wings and that's all done by hand. So what's your process for repeatability with something so intricate and small like that? Yeah, it's actually a lot easier than it looks. As far as getting the precise angles, you take a printout of a true scale template. And then you use that as a reference as you're bending and cutting your brass. And then you match it until you get the angle right.

So you go back and forth. And brass is pretty forgiving when it comes to bending. If you do one bend, you will have to stick to that bend but you have the flexibility of you know change the angle without ruining the whole structure and so you go back and forth you stick the brass wire on the template and then use that as a fixture to solder things together so everything everything starts in a two-dimensional plane. And then you start putting those together to form a three-dimensional sculpture. When you solder things together, how do you put them on the paper?

Do you just tape them? Yep. Okay. And then when you solder one thing, how do you not unsolder the previous joint? Yes, that can be tricky if two solder joints are very close to one another. I mean, because the heat moves. You can't control where it is in the brass. Yes. And surprisingly, brass is, again, even though it's a good conductor of heat, it's not as good as copper. And so heat does travel, but it doesn't travel as fast as, say, in copper.

This is in my own experience. And by using the right amount of heat for the right amount of time with the right amount of flux, you can quickly solder joints together without the heat traveling to the other solder joint and ruining it. It does take practice, but it's easily doable. Can you also apply heat sinks to draw some away in between things? Yeah, definitely. So if you were to put this on a metal block, which I use is just a huge block of steel, that also helps sometimes to draw the heat away.

And it may or may not work in your favor because if you're putting heat and it's getting sucked away at the same time. But I haven't had the necessity to actually put a heat sink. But that actually is a very good idea if you were dealing with complicated structures and you wanted a certain element to stay cool.

On the interceptor here, which I'm so happy you're in studio because we get to see them, all the listeners. Sorry. You have three parallel wires very close together. How did that work?

I mean, you're saying draw the heat away and tape them on the paper, but it seems like as soon as you made one soldering joint, the others would collapse, particularly if they're providing any structural component at that time. Right. And since all of these elements are held together with tape, even if there is slight movement, they'll still stay in place. Okay. But again, you will be surprised how actually easy it is if you tune your time and the temperature right to do closed solder joints. And you said lead-free solder, but so many people have a hard time with that. Did you make the switch or were you always lead free no i had to make a very painful switch um lead i mean i still as far as preferences go i prefer

leaded solder just because it's so much easier to work with um but knowing what the right thing here to do is to use lead free just because i think that's the right thing to do i have learned to use slightly higher temperatures and more flux when you're dabbling with lead-free solder and i think every lead-free solder i have experience is uh different and some have worked for me and some i some haven't and i don't really know what the composition is that works for me so i would say maybe it's a combination of the temperature the flux you use Some haven't, and I don't really know what the composition is that works for me. So I would say maybe it's a combination of the temperature, the flux you use, and the solder itself. But I'm trying to stick to lettering now. It's interesting that you say there have been some that work and some that don't. I think so many people get frustrated when they try it, and they don't realize there are different formulations and

to some extent your life will be better if you just get five different kinds of solder and find one that works absolutely yeah i think that's a good idea of my work provides us with different sorts of gauges and formulations so it's easier to experiment because it can be expensive to get, you know, big giant reels of solder. But I suppose if somebody made a sample pack. That's a good idea. Of, you know, different lead-free solder and maybe combination of fluxes, then I think, yeah, you can find your perfect match. Combination of fluxes would be nice. I never quite get those right. Like either I use too much or

too little or the board is suddenly covered or it's burning and my nose hurts. I don't understand flux. You're not supposed to snort it. What? Really? But it smells so good like Christmas trees. Everyone tells me that and I don't see it. Rosenflux, I think. It's funny because I never used an exhaust fan to draw away the fumes. To me, when I solder and inhale the fumes, it's very nostalgic. So my coworkers would come by and turn on the fan. I'm like, why are you soldering without the fan? And I'm like, eh. I kind of without the fan? And I'm like, eh.

I kind of like it. Everyone's going to get cancer someday. Yeah, you do still get a little smell with the fan. Yes. I tend to agree that you should use the fan. How did you decide that these were sculptures as opposed to bits of electronics? I mean, sculpture is kind of a big word. Yeah.

I think people use the word dead bug or fly wire. Those are not as fun words. Exactly. And I wanted to move away from those words. And I think to me, what made more sense was free-formed because it's free of form, even though it has a form. It sounds more liberating than a dead bug or fly wire. And as far as sculptures go,

I think, I don't know when or how or why I decided to call them sculptures. Maybe somebody described it for me. But the idea that these are structures and sometimes these free-form circuits have a personality. They look like robots or faces or... Interceptors. Interceptors, yeah. And so it makes more sense to call them sculptures than circuits, just circuits. Do you ever call yourself an artist? I secretly do.

That's good. Because I grew up in a, so I have two elder sisters. And so I usually say that I was raised by three moms. And one of my sister is very analytical. She has a master's in economics. And my other sister is a interior designer. And so I feel like I grew up in a household with these two opposing, people like to call it opposing, I don't, opposing poles of thoughts of, you know, like creative undertakings and then analytical math-based world. And I feel like I was in between trying to please both my sisters,

like, hey, look at me, I'm good at math. Or my other sister, look at me, I'm good at drawing. And I feel like I took that into my adulthood where I am happy to go back and forth between the art world and engineering. I think I wish more people were able to do that because that's like an extremely happy place to be. It's challenging at times because the school teaches you things that the art world doesn't like.

Like certain rules that you have to obey when designing electronics in order to pass FCC CE certifications. None of these sculptures would ever pass any sorts of FCC certifications just because they're all flouting it. But you have to unlearn, learn a few things going back and forth. But that's my happy place, being able to combine engineering and art and find a happy medium have you sold any of your sculptures uh nope do you want to uh i don't know probably

not because i feel as soon as i start making money off of the sculptures then the whole idea of i don't know making sculptures would feel more of a work than a hobby yeah we've experienced things like that but I'm extremely fortunate to be able to work have a day job that I equally like that pays well and gives me enough flexibility to dabble in hobbies that don't have to have any monetary value and I don't think that's true for that don't have to have any monetary value. And I don't think that's true for everyone. People sometimes have to make it work in one or the other. And so I don't know how long this will last, but currently I'm happy not selling them. Do you think you'd want to do like a show or exhibition once you had a selection that you wanted to put together?

I think that is in my plan someday to be able to showcase the work at one place in an art gallery or a studio of some sorts where people can come and physically take a look instead of just the pretty pictures I post on Instagram. You do post some pretty pictures on Instagram and you occasionally put things on your blog that talks about how to do them. How do you balance making the sculptures versus describing making the sculptures? Oh, man. I have been getting a lot of requests to do a time-lapse video. Oh, that would be cool.

Or just video in general of things being built and i feel say if i have you know a certain amount of finite time to fill it feels more desirable to spend that time building things rather than having to document them and taking static pictures is so much easier than having to film, edit, and post a video. And so I feel I still am leaning towards the idea of using my time to build things rather than documenting. And as far as things posting on the blog, they come in waves. Like I will not post anything for two years and then maybe find some time to document something, post one tutorial, and then uh you know go radio silent

again but it's it's a constant struggle wanting to show how to do things versus wanting to do the things well yes and there are only so many hours in the day right and sometimes you choose one or the other how do you take your photos ben Henke was asking if you have a setup for that. I do. I mean, I love taking pictures. And I feel taking pictures of people or the nature is far more complicated than taking pictures of things on a table. Because you have more control over it you can you have more uh control over the lights the setting the angle so i have a setup which is

basically a canon dslr it's a t4i which i bought i think nine or eight years ago coupled with a few prime lenses on a tripod and a big light and i just taught myself to play with the settings to get the right depth of field right exposure and then you know bring out the colors and post and let's see i have many listener questions um ruben asked for advice on working with brass wire and uh how to make the wire straight if the bendy brass wire gets bent wrong? I think you have to discard it. Unless it's a curve, if it has a hard bend, then it's almost impossible to straighten it out again. But you can straighten out a reel of brass wire.

And this technique I just learned last year is that you take a reel of wire, brass wire, usually around 18 to 20 gauge, half hard. That's what they call the alloy to be like soft and half hard. And you say cut a two feet length, hold one end in a vice or in between a pair of pliers. And then you hold the other end in a chuck of a drill, like a hand-hand drill. And you literally twist the wire for 10 seconds. And the whole twisting action of the wire straightens it into a rod.

And so when you're done, this like a curved wire turns into a straight brass rod. 10 seconds. Wow, if you told me to do that, I would have expected it to just fly apart. But not at the highest speed. You have to look at the very low speed so you have more control.

So you're like, you know, you count 1,001, 1,002, and you do that for 10 seconds, and I think... And you're twisting it along the axis of the rod. Hopefully. And I guess you would use a chuck for that okay yeah and i have no idea why and how it works but even if you go to a hardware store and buy pre-straightened brass rods you will see that they have twists on them so if you did it that's probably how they do it as to i mean that makes some sense. If you have a curve and then you twist inside the curve, half of it's going to go up, half of it's going to go down. And since you can't just twist apart, the whole thing has to straighten.

And structurally, it still is sound. If you were to twist a very thin gauge wire, it will just break off. I tried doing that with multiple attempts and couldn't succeed. But 18 to 20 gauge seems to work just fine as far as holding its structure. And you've been using brass. Have you tried other things? Copper, silver? I have not tried silver, but I have tried copper. And I just did not like the way it held its shape it was too soft for me and i did not like the the color contrast of a solder solder on copper somehow those are the silver and the

reddish reddish um but i think uh it can be done there is an artist uh leonardo julian i don't know if i'm spelling his last name or pronouncing his last name right but he is an artist who makes sculptures out of brass wires but those are not uh and electronic components but those are not functional sculptures out of of copper wires. Yeah, copper wire and passive electronic components. And his sculptures are more of a drawing or purely a sculpture out of electronic components and copper. But he uses copper beautifully in his sculptures. So I think it can be done.

Yeah, that is pretty beautiful. But they aren't functional. No. How much of the TIE interceptor's wings are important? They are very important. That's how it flies. I deserved that, yes. Why are wings needed

in space at all? I don't understand. They help them to land, I suppose. They look cool. That's where you put the solar panels. TIE fighters are solar panels. X-wings fly in atmospheres. They need both. And you need to put

the guns somewhere. But yeah, on this particular sculpture, the wings are pure vanity. They are just for aesthetics. And i have struggled with this as to how and when do you actually start making things that are purely for aesthetics versus they are actually the part of the structure that makes this whole thing work and i um i don't have a definitive answer to myself as to when and why and how but I so I just use it whenever I feel that it would

look literally cool. Do you recommend people try this instead of learning to do circuit layout for people who are just coming to electronics? I think you should do both having the knowledge of functional electronics is definitely helpful when going into the whole world of making sculptures or free-form electronics. You do need a basic understanding of how to solder, how not to get burned. They say, you know, if it being able to test a circuit before you actually make a sculpture out of it is always beneficial so i wouldn't recommend directly jumping on to sculpture making or freeform circuits i think having the experience of breadboarding something making and you know seeing how to debug an electronic circuit will definitely help in making your sculptures more successful having

said that um there's this person uh in i think czech republic if i am not mistaken a yuri prouse he makes these amazing brass sculptures purely out of one led and coin cells and so you don't even need background in electronics to pull that off and they are amazing you can use them as jewelry as ornaments as you know christmas tree ornaments and so there are ways you can use circuit building ideas and make extremely simple circuits without the knowledge of electronics so jewelry is interesting i asked about silver wire because i have done a little bit of wire wrap jewelry have you ever looked into classes or books on that to get ideas for different methods of wiring um yes when i was looking at buying pliers um a lot of the websites and information pointed me to jewelry pliers that had special flat head tips and round tips. And that was very educational to see actual jewelers use wires.

But that technique, I feel, is for if you are doing wire wrapping, as you said, without having to solder or, how do I put this, for more organic shapes. I think for doing things that I do in my style, you can get away with a flat needle nose plier. You don't need those special tools that jewelry makers use. Well, one of the things that jewelry pliers don't have is the little grippy bit at the end. Most of my electronics pliers have little teeth at the end for better gripping, but the jewelry pliers don't have those teeth and they're totally flat at the end. Do yours have teeth? No. So, yeah, that's a very good point because if you use that

and brass is so soft that you will have benchmarks. I have little bite marks. Yeah. But the plier I was talking about, Xuron, it's X-U-R-O-N. It's an American-based company that makes a whole bunch of pliers and diagonal cutters, flush cutters. And I like those because the flush cutters have a retaining clip. So, for example, when you're cutting off the leads of an electronic component, the leads usually go flying off. Yeah. Never to be found or to be found in a sock.

So, these flush cutters have a retainer clip so when you cut something they retain the the cut part holding on to the uh on the other end so it doesn't go flying off and i happened to you know discover that after i bought that thing i'm like oh this is an interesting feature i wish all flush cutters had this because you don't want things to be flying off. And brass can be, you know, like a flying projectile because at 18 gauge, it can cause damage if you are not wearing your eyeglasses. So that company combined with just going to Michael's and, you know, going through the jewelry section, they have so many colorful like I wish they used more color colorful pliers and flush cutters that don't have any of those

grippy grips at the end. And then there are also pliers that are curved tips so if you wanted to create loops. Yeah, I have some of those that are really fun to play with. So those are fun. I actually used one of the loop making bit to make a loop to hold the die interceptor's wings.

So that as I was soldering, it would not fall off. So they pass through a loop and then I do a tack joint. And once you're done, then you solder it together. I think that you make me want to try this, but I would want to do all curvy lines and spirals and wiggly bits.

It's funny, the style that I have developed is a style that basically is a fear of curves. It is very rectilinear and it's purely based i like the aesthetics and also my inability to do organic shapes and so it's the combination of my lack of uh knowledge or skills combined with my draw towards

like strict lines because when you're laying out pcbs all the lines are at either 45 degrees or 90 degrees and it's very as you said rectilinear and that's something that i grew comfortable around and just easy to make as opposed to an organic shape of a bird flower mushroom bird wing yeah and so some of the uh there are people who are dabbling in free from circuits that are doing organic shapes and for example yuri had made this uh blooming flower um that is you know like flower petals and it actually is um kinematic which means it's it has a tiny motor and that makes the petal leaves bloom. It's all over the place and people are coming up with so many beautiful, creative ideas to use this as a way to make sculptures.

But I like your straight lines and I can't actually imagine how you get them. How do you get such tight corners? It's again, a lot easier than it looks. All you have to do is find the right plier, apply the right pressure, and every single joint will be pretty tight. And having a template printed out to compare against always helps. So you know that your angles are 90 or 45 or whatever you want. I think Tom asked, after he makes a bend, the material springs back.

Does that not happen as much with brass as other materials? No. Brass is pretty malleable. So it doesn't have the, I don't know what the technical term is, that holds springiness. Elasticity. Elasticity. So it will hold its shape pretty well. As opposed to, I say say i think maybe a guitar

string or piano wire maybe they're designed to move back and forth where do you get your materials you mentioned going to michael's but where do you get your brass wire now um coming back to the story of finding brass wire at ace hardware and it's it's And Home Depot does not carry it, surprisingly. It's only the small hobby stores. So Blick Arts, Ace Hardware, Hobby Lobby carries them. And they're all made by the same manufacturer called K&S Metals, based out of Chicago. They are the only ones who will sell pre-straightened brass rods in the US.

But then recently I discovered you can buy a spool of brass wire for much, much cheaper and then straighten it to the length that you want it to be. And you can buy that off any jewelry store or on Amazon, if you would like. And that's a much cheaper way to make these. What's been your most ambitious sculpture idea so far? Is it the Millennium Falcon? You can tell us. It's just an idea.

I have been really wanting to introduce motion in the sculptures. So I have this idea of making an animatronic head, literally like Johnny Five out of the movie Short Circuit, but purely based on a free-form circuits. Something that it can express emotions through its, you know, rolling its eyes or eyebrows, but not too, what's it, the uncanny valley where you don't want it to look too real.

And so trying to find that combination where I can introduce more personality to these sculptures uh by using motion but it has been on my drawing board since the last one year i still haven't executed on it because if you were considered using um and forgive me for giving you suggestions you do not need suggestions but things are coming in my head um at a medical company we used a kind of wire called nitinol, which I think was nickel titanium something else. Memory wire.

Yeah, and it would either snap back to a position that it was formed into, or you can also apply a current. We didn't do that, and it'll do stuff. Have you ever played with that? I have seen that, and in fact, the beam community was talking about using those. And I think, if I am not wrong, those wires take a while to change shapes. For very slow-moving sculptures, that could possibly be looked into. But yeah, I don't know if it solders well. But the idea that you use them as muscles in a sculpture would be interesting.

Why aren't your sculptures covered in blobs of hot glue like mine would be? If hot glue conducted, I probably might also start using it. And I try, again, this is, you know, an internal struggle. Do you want to use tape? Do you want to use wire? Do you want to use glue in your sculptures? Or do you want to be a purist and just only use solder? Because it can be looked upon as a challenge.

Like, can I do this purely using brass wire and solder? Because with everything I understand from soldering, you're not supposed to use solder as a structural element. That was like one of the things that I always did wrong. But you are, in fact, breaking that rule. I suppose. Well, it's used as a structural element in plumbing and other kinds of. True. And I also found out before, I mean, before I discovered the whole world of using brass for circuits, people have been using brass for centuries and you know model rail boat rail model rail builders have been using brass to

make like fences and rail tracks and you know just things that will then later be painted on so you don't see the brass but it's i mean to my surprise has been like a favorite material for artists especially in model making for a very very, very long time. And so I think brass and solder were meant to be together. What has been your largest sculpture? I would say this Thai interceptor, because it doesn't fit inside one of those glass domes that I have. But I would say that's one of the biggest. And I would always keep the structure size small to begin with.

Anything that can fit on my desktop. So I don't have any ideas or plans to make giant sculptures. I like to keep them small. I want to take that. So some of the other sculptures that Mohit has brought us, they are on little wooden platforms and it's clear that you could put a bell jar over them. But the Thai interceptor,

its wings go a little outside. It's, it's wood. I really want to put it into like a snow globe and shake it up. Shake it up. Why? I don't know. It just looks like it belongs in a snow globe. Oh, it could. And I suppose you can. Yeah. Shake it up. Why? I don't know. It just looks like it belongs in a snow globe.

Oh, it could. And I suppose you can, yeah. A little large. Snow and TIE fighters. Yeah, I think. Make them little stars. Yeah, little stars. What do you have planned next?

I have a book full of ideas and i feel like i just i'm struggling to find time to get these sculptures made um but as far as my uh new year's resolution for back in 2019 was to make more videos that i completely not crushed i probably made two videos and i think i want to attempt at making more videos because that's something that can be educational to people who want to get a glimpse into what the process looks like. And I feel like I owe that at least to the folks who are interested in knowing how to make things. So making videos of the sculptures being built built is i think on the agenda would you just want to make videos of here's me building a new thing or here's a tutorial on how here's how you properly bend this or saw i ideally both i mean i have you know youtube can be a rabbit hole

and you come across this amazing amazing edited videos of how to do things. And I have this notion where I will make this video with the right editing and the right angles explaining certain ideas. But I feel, I think at the end of the day, what I'm going to do is just have an overhead camera and just start there instead of trying to get it right the way I want it to be. It is really hard.

I've wanted to do videos, but I don't want to put out the quality of video that I am capable of making. And yet I see other people put out videos that are great, but they aren't necessarily high quality. They just tell me what I want to know. And yet I can't quite bring myself to put out that quality so it's a vicious cycle and then there's the problem of all the time you spend doing the video and learning how to make it good is time you're not spending bending wire exactly exactly

and but in grand scheme of things if i don't know like if i'm going to build 10 sculptures in a year maybe i shouldn't be making only eight and you know just like consciously decide that yes i want to make a video even if it's not the best video that i can come up with it lets leads a video so get that out the door you need to con somebody else into making the video for it what's your plan what do you want to be when you grow up oh boy that has changed over the years i think in an ideal world i would see myself not work for money yes yes let's all do that maybe have a cabin out in the woods with an electronics lab and a machine shop

and just keep building things because I want to. And having the privilege of being able to do that without having to worry about anything else would be nice. Has your work with this kind of fabrication fed back into how you think about your day job layout or other things? Not really layout, but it has pushed me to look into different displays, exotic displays, vintage electronics, and just being able to appreciate how things were built, coming across different circuits to drive these. It's educational. Not the act of building it, but the research that you have to do to get there.

Because I would not look into Nixie tubes at my day job ever. But this has forced me to, hey, maybe you should use Nixie tubes in your next project. But you have to have a high voltage driver to drive the Nixie tubes. How do you do that? And do you look into the circuits that would allow you to do that? And so you're always learning new things. It's not just that you're using the existing knowledge that you have to make these sculptures. So yes, there's a lot of incoming knowledge from that world as well.

And does it apply or is it, I mean, I'm always of the opinion that no knowledge is truly wasted, that learning itself is a useful activity, but does it have any practical use? Not really. That's cool. No, no practical use at all. What did you do with Nixie Tubes? I wanted to make, what did I do? Let me answer that.

I bought them. Or it always starts. It's often where it ends. Yes. And that's where it has ended for me for now. Because I went again on eBay trying to find the coolest of the cool Nixie tubes and I have a collection, a box full of them and all the required circuitry and the components to make it happen.

I wanted to make a bedside clock with Nixie tubes and free-form circuits which I haven't done yet and that is also in the long list of project ideas that I have is the theme of using Nixie tubes to make different sculptures.

I have gotten close to it by using Numitron tubes. And Numitrons are, they look exactly like Nixie tubes. Numitron is N-U-M-I-T-R-O-N. Numitron, or it's a Japanese, I think, word. So instead of using gas discharge around the digits, it uses filaments, just like your light bulbs, incandescent light bulbs.

But they operate at a much lower voltage, at 5 volts. So you can use your low voltage electronics to drive them, but they give the same old, vintage look of an XC tube. So I have made a bedside clock using it, but haven't really used Nixie tube yet.

So that's on the agenda. I've also invested in old cathode ray tubes, the CRT tubes that would go into old oscilloscopes. Not full color, but just like single color scanning CRT tubes. And there are projects out there that you can display certain texts, Not full color, but just like single color scanning CRT tubes. And there are projects out there that you can display certain texts and even an analog clock. So, yeah, you would not believe how many boxes of electronics I've collected over the years. And I had to transport them from Minneapolis to San Francisco. And we downsized quite a bit.

But we have an entire room just for the boxes, upon boxes that I have of all the parts for future projects. You mentioned you moved from Minneapolis to San Francisco pretty recently. Yes, it was in July of this year. What's been the best and the worst part of that? Oh boy. I grew up along the coastline in Mumbai, and I've always been drawn to the ocean. So being back, being able to be next to a sea or a coastline has been the best thing ever. And California offers you ocean, mountains, snow, desert.

It's just so much. And traffic. And traffic, desert. It's just so much. And traffic. And traffic, yes. So that's the good. The bad has been just getting around in the city. Not a big fan of San Francisco as a city, but a big fan of California as a state. Well, I think we have kept you from the sunshine and the beach long enough. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

I would say to the listeners that if you are drawn to this way of building sculptures, you should definitely give it a try. It's much, much easier than it looks. And it's, yeah, you should definitely give it a try. Our guest has been Mohit Bojitde, sculptor and senior hardware engineer at Particle. Thanks, Mohit. This was fun.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to listener Ruben for requesting Mohit be on the show. See the contact link on Embedded FM. See, it really does work.

Thank you to the Embedded Patreon Slack channel for questions. And thank you to the patrons for Mohit's mic, although he brought it back because he brought it in to us. And then thank you for listening. You can contact us, contact link on Embedded FM or show at Embedded FM. And before we close up, I do want to remind you that it's December, which is usually considered the giving season. We should give all year long. But if you have some donations that you want to make, remember when we had Jacob on to talk about Digital Nest? One of our very fine and generous listeners has offered to match anything you can donate up to $2,500. So if we

all work together, they get $5,000 and that means a few more people get access to technology they wouldn't otherwise get access to. We're very proud of our listeners who have contributed and we'd like to invite you to join them. And finally, a quote to leave you with from the movie Short Circuit. And it is the robot speaking here. Number five, stupid name. Want to be Kevin or Dave. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering.

It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.