Embedded - 382: Playing In the Desert

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

Leah Buechley spoke with us about the intersection of computer science and art. She is an associate professor in the computer science department of the University of New Mexico where she directs the Hand and Machine research group. Her website is leahbuechley.com, her research group website is handandmachine.cs.unm.edu. You can find her on Twitter at @leahbuechley. She wrote the book Textile Messages: Dispatches From the World of E-Textiles and Education and developed the LilyPad Arduino for wearable electronics. We talked about Chibitronics, paper circuits, developed by Jie Qi  (who was on Embedded 277: The Sport of Kings talking about patents as well as Chibitronics) We talked about Nettrice Gaskins’ Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom An example of a tiny stepper motor on eBay Introduction to VQGAN + CLIP to generate art

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Professor Leah Beakley. We're going to talk about machines and hands and art. Hello, Professor Beakley. Thank you for joining us. Hello. Thank you for joining us. Hello. Thank you for having me. Could you tell us about yourself as if this was the first day of classes? kind of at the intersection of computer science and electronics and really design and craft. I'm also very interested in education. And so the work that I do tends to take place at the intersection of all of those things. And it's easiest to talk about with props. But we'll do the best we can.

Yeah. Audio only is tough for props. Okay. We want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask how and why and all of that. Are you ready? Ready. Science or engineering?

Engineering. Art or engineering? Engineering. Art or craft? Craft. Favorite artist? Andrea Zittle. Hardware or software? Hardware. What's your preferred way to learn new things?

Reading, videos, trying it out until you make it work. Doing it, for sure. Favorite fictional robot? Ooh, I'm going to pass on that one because I can't answer quickly. Doesn't like any robots. Complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, complete one project, for sure. Can an image created by an AI be art? Yes. Complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, complete one project for sure.

Can an image created by an AI be art? Yes. And I want to keep talking, but I'm going to resist the temptation. Maybe we can come back to that. Tip everyone should know. Don't be afraid to copy the work of other people as a great way to get started. I like that. There used to be these painting schools that that's what they did.

They copied the old masters. And we seem to be so afraid of copying other people's ideas in order to get that experience for ourselves. It's weird. Yeah, no, you can learn so much and it can, I think it's, we are too afraid of copying and pretty naturally you end up doing your own thing. So, yeah. It's hard to actually copy. Yeah. You know, it's hard to be somebody else for any extended period of time. Your, your own weirdness just takes over pretty quickly. So going back to, can AIs make art?

Yeah. So I would expand that and say that the context in which that is happening is really critical. And what is, I think what computation brings to art and design is in large part the power to build kind of entire classes or entire families of kind of related things. And so in that context, I think both the output of an art, would be comprised of more than just a single image. It would be the code. It would be probably a whole family of images and kind of a larger body of work than, like, a single painting, for example, that I would want to see before I would call anything like that art. And again, kind of the context and the intent are important there too. So yeah, so with some asterisks. But the answer is a definite yes with some expansion. Do you want to follow up on that?

Because you were the one playing with the GAN. It just came to mind. That's the reason I put that in there was I've been following people who are using a neural network system called Clip and something GAN. I'm going to space it. We'll put it in the show notes.

It's like VQGAN or something. But you can go in and you can type a prompt and it'll go through and using its various things it's been trained on it'll generate images and they can be very surreal weird images and some and things i've tried to do with it come out as just kind of like bad dreams but i've seen other people who are more skilled at prompting it come out with things that actually look like you know paintings and or very very cool haunting ethereal things and have an emotional response to it.

And yet it just came out of this neural network and somebody just typed, make a fancy surreal bookstore. So it's hard for me to call it art, but it's also, I had emotional response to it. So how is it not? I'm a big fan of the artist Natrice Gaskins. Actually, she just came out with a new book.

It's Technovernacular Creativity, I believe, that I wrote a foreword for. But her work is, I think, a gorgeous example of how AI-generated images really can rise to the, to the label of art. Um, like one lovely example. Cool. We'll have that in the show notes. Cool. Okay. So your research group is called Hand and Machine. Why is it called that? Yeah. My career has really been about finding ways to bring a humanness and a materialness to technology. And so that is kind of reflected in the name. I'm also very interested in exploring and kind of questioning these dichotomies that we often set up, like that the hand and machine would be so different or that they would be so much in opposition, I think is worth questioning. And so that provocation is also appealing and part of why I chose the term. Not so different from the name of my previous research group,

which was high-low tech, embodying kind of some of the same ideas and some of the same style of approach. Did you switch the name as part of moving from MIT to University of New Mexico, or was there another reason? Yeah, I mean, in large part, it felt like a fresh start in a really different context. So for all sorts of reasons, UNM is really, really different from MIT and it felt appropriate to kind of put the MIT work, which I'm so proud of and so I'm delighted with,

and especially, you know, work that I got to do with my students there, but to kind of tie that in a bow and set it aside and start something fresh and new. So, yeah, I wanted to choose a new name and have a distinct new start there. Boston, and MIT particularly, has a very enthusiastic engineering community. New Mexico is more known for art. Do you, although in perhaps, you know, often unexpected ways, one of the things that's been wonderful about being in New Mexico, more so than I think the art community per se, has been the landscape and the materials that are readily kind of at hand, being able to spend a lot of time outside, a lot of time sinking and being in just dirt, for example. I've done a lot of kind of work around clay that I think is really related to that,

just like being closer to like the dirt. And also being much more involved in like being, but being able to do stuff like go hiking and backpacking and gardening and stuff has had a wonderful effect. So definitely the setting really matters and communities really matter, but in probably more subtle ways than just like art versus engineering in some sense. So talking about clay, I saw on your website something about computational ceramics. What could that possibly be? Right, right.

So where to dive in? So I should say one of the ways in which I work is to become infatuated with a material, so textiles or paper or kind of more recently clay, and then just start to play with it and explore it and see ways in which I can bring my engineering expertise or my computational expertise to kind of to bear on that material. So the work in clay that I've been doing is focused around computational design or algorithmic design in ways that kind of traditions and techniques from that community can be applied to clay and also how we can combine kind of cutting edge technology and computational approaches with longstanding traditions of working with clay. So more concretely, I've done a lot of work around using the laser cutter to, for example, etch patterns into clay, to create templates that you then press into clay to generate computationally designed surface patterns. Also worked to create some software that lets you generate kind of computationally designed,

essentially origami patterns, but for clay. And then kind of the most recent development that I'm really excited about is we just got a ceramic 3D printer for my lab. So we're starting to write some custom software so that we can kind of computationally generate 3D forms that are then printed in ceramics. And then once they're printed, I think also a really critical part of the process is that you can use traditional ceramic techniques, kind of traditional crafting techniques in all sorts of ways to kind of take the next step of the process. Or often you can integrate new and different computational processes at each step of kind of a traditional crafting process.

So all of that is really exciting and interesting and something I'm having a lot of fun exploring right now. Jacobs, who's one of my former students from MIT and is now a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara, that she and I just got an NSF grant to explore kind of computational design and ceramics, and in particular, some kind of traditional artisans who work with clay and to try to find interesting combinations at those intersections. So I'm really excited to start working on that project with Jennifer also. Is it about making the ceramics more aesthetically pleasing or are you also trying to make them stronger for less material. Yeah, not so much stronger for less material, although, but a couple of things I would say. One is that I think there is a tremendous amount

that fabrication researchers can learn from traditional craftspeople about the possibilities of materials, about processes that are kind of off our radar, about just different kinds of materials that might be totally off our radar. So part of this is like learning from traditional craftspeople, kind of how they work with clay, some of the technologies, techniques, materials that they use, and using that to inform research on computational design and fabrication. And just from my experience so far working with ceramics,

there's like so much that you can learn from traditional craftspeople that's really applicable to like developing new technology. So that's one facet of it. And then the other facet is kind of the arrow going the other way, where when you use computation in the context of design, you open up just entirely new worlds of possibility. computation to generate shapes and patterns and structures that just you would never generate by hand and um and so bringing those possibilities to kind of um to blend with traditional craft um is also really exciting both aestheticallyically, potentially, functionally, although that's not, you know, we're not taking an especially kind of functionally oriented approach here, but it wouldn't be surprising if some of the results would end up being functional. But yeah, just that conversation between those two traditions and those two perspectives is what seems really exciting. What, what, can you give me a hands-on, like, what have you learned from an artisan that has

affected computational ceramics? Right, right, sure. So one of the first things that I did is I created this whole kind of library of trying to bring together computational techniques and approaches with traditional ceramics. And so a traditional ceramic craft, one of the things that people have done with ceramics for a very long time is carve the surface of ceramics. And then there are all sorts of traditional techniques that are based on kind of layering that carving with like different colors or clay, for example, to create all sorts of surface patterns and textures, but also like graphic effects. So you might kind of carve the surface of the clay, then paint it and, you know, then wipe away the excess paint so that the paint stays only in the areas where you carved it. Or conversely, you might paint something first, then carve it, right, to kind of create those opposite effects. And you can imagine layering these techniques in all sorts of interesting ways. So within the traditional ceramics world, there are

all sorts of these established techniques for making marks on the surface of ceramics. When you combine that with the laser cutter, you can kind of add the power of computation to all of those traditional techniques. And instead of carving through using a traditional carving tool, you can carve using the laser cutter. You can play around with, you know, different layers of kind of glaze or under glaze to get really beautiful kind of graphical patterns in clay. You can play around with how in focus or out of the focus the laser cutter is to get dramatic kind of gradation effects. So that expertise that comes like from the craft community can really inform things you choose to do with technology. And then what you're

able to do with technology in turn is really different than what you're able to do with technology in turn is really different than what you're able to do by hand and so there's this wonderful like back and forth that's really productive and interesting i've done a little bit of ceramics and a little bit of the sgraffito carving yeah sgraffito yeah yeah and, Sgraffito. Yeah, yeah. Sgraffito. And Mishima. And yes, you can like, yeah, all of those techniques. But I think the closest I came to anything computational was glaze generation and trying to do the chemistry of the glaze, mostly through trial and error and tree searches. Right. Well, I mean, another thing that you learn as you explore

any of these particular domains is that they're already, they're all quite technical and many of them are already quite computationally technical. So another place where computation is quite present already in traditional ceramics practices, like the kiln and the firing processes that, you know, the kiln goes through to get exactly the right kind of temperature at exactly the right time. And so... And air composition, whether you want oxygen or not. Right, right, right, right. So all of those things, like when you approach it as like a hacker, like there's so many possibilities. And that is a lot of what I love about these intersections.

Is this about making things beautiful or interesting people in computer science or something else? Right. So I think for me, it's many things at the same time. So beauty is always really important. I think just beauty is so important to all human beings and it's something that um it's easy in for whatever reason in our culture today to think of as like a trivial or frivolous thing but i think it's actually a core, really important human value and one that we should honor and take pride in. Anyway, so I think beauty is incredibly important to the human experience. And so, yes, beauty is critical there and something I wish that more people embraced

and defended, kind of. So beauty is really important. Technology and developing innovative technology is also really important. So I'm not so interested in doing stuff that doesn't involve really creating some piece of novel technology in some way. Also, there's a kind of social cultural element to my work where I'm very interested in kind of looking for inspiration in places that seem maybe forgotten or underappreciated by society, often that can mean turning towards technologies and materials that were traditionally used by women. That's a whole source of like amazing stuff that has been historically kind of undervalued just because it was like stuff that women did.

And so bringing kind of attention and celebration and acknowledgement to some of those spaces is another just aspect of my work that is that when you can put technology in the context of a craft or an art or a design practice that has maybe been traditionally overlooked, and often that's because, again, that's been something that is done by a community of people we don't pay a lot of attention to, then very naturally there are wonderful ways to kind of engage different kinds of communities into kind of creating technology for themselves and rethinking like the power that people can get from building technology and designing technology and trying to make that power and status and and stuff accessible and inviting to more and different kinds of people so it's all like interconnected um but all those aspects are there i remember when fractal pictures started coming out in the 80s, 90s. It sort of started getting popular in the late 80s when computers could do something. And realizing that you could program that. And it wasn't really very hard to program something to get incredible, amazing images out.

Well, they were incredible for them. Well, Well, they were incredible for them. Well, yes, they were incredible for them. Now, you know, not even a can would bother with that. Look, this has four colors. But yes, yes. I can understand how that sort of awe and beauty can bring people to technology to help them realize that those people who are a little afraid of the technology, it provides a bridge. You also do more fabrication. It's not just pretty pictures on screens.

Not to downplay pretty pictures on screens, because they're amazing. Right. But the fabrication is part of it for you. And that's part of the building the new technologies? Or is that just because the fabrication is what's interesting to you? Yeah, I think both. I think personally, I've always been drawn to, I mean, computing and like electronics and hardware, or whether that's through kind of having the code, like generate something that then is like a physical object in the real world. Like that is, is just kind of, for me, like extra exciting and compelling. And so I think,

and there's also all sorts of, you know, really exciting, interesting, like new technology to develop in that space. And so it's a mashup of those two things. come alive in the real world off of the screen. Yeah, it'd be hard for me to move into working on projects that lived only on the screen. I just find the physical world completely enchanting and fascinating. I totally agree. That's why I do Embedded, because the first time I made a motor move and it was under my control, it was just magic. My bits can affect the actual

physical world. How is that possible? So yeah, I love that feeling. Yeah, totally. Totally. How do interactive murals fit into all of this? Yeah. So that's a totally different project that I'm also really excited about, distinct from the ceramics. So that is a project that I'm working on in collaboration with some wonderful students in my research group here at UNM, in particular Alicia Bustos, who's awesome. And also an amazing mural artist named Nani Chacon. And she, well, she just is an amazing painter. And this project, when I was at MIT, I did a series of projects around interactive wallpaper. So thinking about embedding kind of sensors and

computation and actuators like lights and tiny motors and things like that kind of on very large indoor surfaces so that you could have these surfaces that were beautiful, like wallpaper and decorative, but also could monitor your environment, could, you know, do some tracking of like where you were in the space, could act as like a control for all of the other electronics in the room or in your home. So thinking about, again, like a kind of ambient, kind of beautiful, large surface in your home that might function as an input-output device. Those were made primarily by painting, using conductive paint, kind of painting circuit boards onto either very large sheets of paper or directly onto walls to make these interactive wallpaper pieces. So that was a project that my students and I did at MIT, and it was really kind of fun and interesting. When I came to New Mexico, again, in large part,

I think because of the context and the culture here and the traditions, there's an amazing mural painting tradition in the Southwest and in particular here and the traditions, there's an amazing mural painting tradition in the Southwest and in particular in New Mexico. And so I thought, oh, I would love to do like a similar thing, but in the context of murals. And there's, you know, the technology in some sense is similar, but it's a lot harder because these things have to live outside in the elements. They're much larger than a wall in your houses. And then... You can't hide the batteries in the frame. Yeah, there's not a lot of hiding of stuff. I mean, that was true of the wallpapers. That's true.

To some extent also, but you could plug it into your computer off to the side in a way that you can't really with an outdoor mural. But then the interaction possibilities are also really different. So murals are at a different scale than a home. So you get really far away from them more than you would a wall in your home. Cars drive past them. You know, they're in public spaces instead of private students are painting like our first kind of very large scale interactive mural right now on the UNM campus. Again, using a crazy combination of conductive paints and tapes to have everything be just kind of flat and really integrated into the painting, kind of playing around with both different themes and designs for the mural and also different, you know, interaction scenarios, like what do we want to do with this thing?

And that was my next question. What does it do? Right. So right now we're in the process of building it. So we have some, so there are embedded lights in parts of it that are part of the display. We have some kind of color changing elements as well. Lots of painted on capacitive sensors that allow for kind of interaction through touch and also collaborative interaction. So to trigger certain behaviors, like I have to touch one part and you have to touch the other part at a certain time and that will trigger certain behaviors we're just starting to play with some of um some of those possibilities like making games for example that you can play like on the mural across this very large wall um a lot of it also

just getting back to beauty is just like it's I think. And the combination to me of the traditional mural painting and the like aesthetic of the electronics is really interesting. The look and feel of like conductive inks and tapes and stuff kind of integrated into this giant painting is really beautiful. So we're playing with all of that. So stay tuned on that front. I don't know that I have a great like finished description yet, but we're having lots of fun. Is this related to your work with Chibitronics? In a roundabout way. So yeah. So another paper that, another material that I became really infatuated with right around the time when paper, kind of developing different ways that we could embed electronics in paper. joined my research group first as an undergraduate, um, uh, visiting student. And then, then as a, as a PhD students shortly after, and she brought, um, to the group and to the lab,

like this amazing expertise in paper. Um, she's been, she had been working with paper for a very long time. And so, um, G then just was like rocket fuel to like all of the paper explorations that we did in our lab. And she did all sorts of incredibly beautiful and imaginative and like groundbreaking things with kind of paper-based electronics. We, um, you know, collaborated on some of that stuff. a lot of it was really driven by by the work that g did um one of the the outcomes of that is that g um kind of turned some of her developments into this kit for um uh paper-based computing called circuit stickers and um a startup company called chibi tronics um so it was like that was really grounded in the work that we did in the group around paper-based electronics

and paper-based computing. So it was a joy to be able to work with Chi and collaborate with Chi around some of that stuff. And I'm so proud of the work that she's done since including her work in Chibitronics and designing circuit stickers with Bunny Huang and others. So that was great. So I guess before that, you must have been interested in wearable technologies because you were involved with the development of the lily pad. How did that come about? Yeah, so I would say more I was really,

I was infatuated and really interested in textiles and the materials of like fabric and yarn and kind of soft, flexible things. So really my PhD project was around developing a set of techniques for embedding electronics into textiles. And one outcome of that was designing the lily pad Arduino. And then I was just right place, right time. I got my PhD in Boulder, Colorado, right when SparkFun was starting up. So I developed this technology and this board and I kind of took it to them and was like, hey, do you guys want to mass produce this and sell this? And they were like, yeah. And so we worked

together and that was kind of how Lilypad came about. It was like this project that came out of my academic research, but um and then they were able to like commercialize and distribute and that was that's been a wonderful um collaboration ever since so what do you wish someone had told you when you were starting that process gosh that's a tricky one I mean one one thing maybe the biggest thing is like that I might tell myself at the start of that project is like it's okay to let go of a project and like move on to a new one and like, you know, let other people take it over at a certain point. Because, yeah, like it's good to let go of old projects to make space for like new ones. Yeah. So the lily pad got commercialized and then you were G's mentor at MIT while she was developing the circuit stickers.

As you were watching that go into more of a professional commercial fabrication sort of thing, did you have advice for her? Was it very different? Was there a lot the same? talked about and have talked about a fair amount just um you know and she in there are in certain ways chibitronics and like circuit stickers is modeled on the lily pad like it's a kit for constructing electronics in this different medium it's this you know a set of um components that you know were similar in many ways to like the set of components that Lilypad offered. So in a lot of ways, like Lilypad maybe is kind of, was kind of at least an initial template for Circuit Stickers. I think then other choices were really different. So one thing that that GE did that was really different is that she and she worked with Bunny and they started their own company as opposed to kind of offloading the um you know the the production and distribution

onto a third party like I did with SparkFun they really they um had to deal with all of that stuff too and I think that has benefits and drawbacks it was a harder thing to do. But then I think they also reap some benefits from that. They had more fine-tuned control over the design and so on. talk about from time to time, just like, you know, what it's like to run a small kind of hardware business, what it's like when that business like evolves over time and changes and the whole context around like this, this thing that you did, you know, changes and all of that is really interesting. And you like to think that like your project had a role in changing that larger context. And I don't know, it's interesting both of those projects have made a huge impact in making stem more approachable through art just making it more fun what's coming up in the future do you have anything any ideas of are you watching anything that has the potential to be as much fun as Lilypad or Tibitronics?

Oh, gosh, that's such an interesting question. it's delightful to see just how many more things there are like that out in the hardware world and how much more like celebration of and acceptance of like these these um you know non-traditional electronics um just how much more of of appreciation of that there is so i i think there's all sorts of like beautiful and interesting stuff happening that really wasn't, you know, when I started out at all. I think especially you see that in opportunities for young people. So it used to be that, you know, it was just there was none of this really when I started working on Lilypad Arduino, you couldn't get any of these materials that are weird, like the electronics, which is kind of like snap circuits and that was it so the the blossoming of all of

these different creative things that you can do with electronics i think it's so wonderful and great there i some the projects that i'm working on right now i'm i'm having lots of fun i think they're really exciting opportunities in computational design and fabrication, which is where I'm spending a lot of my time and energy these days. I think for better or for worse, that's a space where it's less amenable to a kit that you sell to somebody. On the other hand, I think there are really exciting things that can be done in software to make those spaces more accessible and also to prompt people to think creatively about materials and tools and so on. And certainly you see lots of that out there already. But I think there are all sorts of possibilities there for more stuff along those lines, too. So I don't know. I think there's more fun for everybody on the horizon, including myself.

So that's good. Okay. You said origami like 45 minutes ago. And half the people who are listening are like, and she didn't even stop? And on your website, on the Hand and Machine, Machine and Hand? Hand and Machine, yeah. Hand and Machine, it talks about paper and tiny machines. Now, I'm really into origami, especially origami with curves and and snails um

so I need to know everything you can tell me about this yeah so this stems from um the large part the origin is I became obsessed at a certain point with like teeny tiny motors. I think they became like widespread because of digital cameras with little moving shutters, which are now kind of obsolete. But thankfully, you can still get the motors. So you can get these teeny tiny stepper motors in particular that are like the size of your fingernail that are just well they're gorgeous and and to me anyway they suggest that you should put them into paper and make tiny little machines and tiny little mechanisms um so i have a whole like it's an ebay addiction to buy uh tons and tons of these motors i have a whole bunch of them and um this is a project that yeah has been a little bit on the back burner since

covid um the last kind of interesting thing that um that i was able to do along those lines with is to collaborate with a wonderful researcher, Hanju Oh, who's a professor at Georgia Tech now in the industrial design department there. We shared an academic advisor, Mike Eisenberg, so we became close that way but she does amazing stuff with paper mechanics and so we collaborated around kind of building a set of mechanisms seeing what these teeny little motors could do with paper and so we made a kind of a library of these little mechanisms like thinking about different ways to make gears and cams and stuff, just purely out of really lightweight, kind of purely paper, and then using these tiny stepper motors to move stuff around. We then taught a workshop.

Again, it was like a year, like, I guess, two years ago now, right kind of the summer before COVID and explored that with a group of people, which was really fun. It's a project that I would really like to pick back up again, because I think there's so many possibilities there for, you know, paper mechanics and paper mechanisms that are just incredibly delicate and effective. Also, you can quite easily, I think, translate those or transport them onto wearables and kind of body-worn things because they're so know, don't consume much power and all of those things. So I think there's tons of potential there. I've done a little and I'd love to do more. So how small are these?

Yeah, I mean, they range. So you can get there's some pictures on my Instagram that show a collection, but some of them are really like the size of your pinky fingernail or something. And then some of them are more like, I don't know, maybe the size of your thumbnail or something, but these beautiful little motors, they're pretty awesome. I'm seeing some on Amazon that are about three quarter inch by three quarter inch. No, much tinier. I'll send you a link yeah i need a link for that the snails must crawl um sorry what uh are you putting together a library of these where can i find your mechanisms are they still in the research and development stage yeah we um i'm

trying to think did we we, we had a website and then I don't know what happened to it. It was kind of, we made it for this workshop and I would have to dig it up. So the easiest answer is yes, they're still in like this R&D phase. Yeah, it was one of these things where COVID just everything went haywire and that was one of the threads that got lost unfortunately but it's good to talk because it's a reminder to pick it back up yes just pick it back up for me I don't care about anybody else just for me um I should have asked you before what's your favorite conductive thread oh gosh that's a tricky one um i would say i don't have a favorite it all depends on

your application and what you're wanting to do i mean just pure stainless steel is probably the best for straightforward stuff most importantly it doesn't corrode um and i like the one i'll get in trouble perhaps for saying this, but I like Adafruit's conductive stainless steel thread. But just the variety is great, and different threads are good for different applications. Okay. I'll accept that.

But when you say stainless steel, it's soft and flexible like a traditional thread, but it's all of the little fibers that make up the thread are actually stainless steel. I'm just getting lost in the... Oh, I totally understand. Yeah. You can go down rabbit holes of textile fabrication machines. Yeah. They're great. Yeah. When I looked at your site, you also had fabrics that weren't printed, had threads? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? You probably mean, so one of the projects we're working on

is a collaboration with a team of civil engineers here at UNM, which is looking at embedding kind of smart, like electronic textiles into composites, um, for aerospace, but also just for civil engineering broadly. Um, and that is, um, where we kind of fabricate these, uh, circuits that are entirely fabric based. Um, so this is using So this is using some of the techniques I developed when I was in graduate school for making laser-cut textile circuits out of conductive fabric. So you can make really beautiful, precisely laid out, essentially printed circuit boards, but they're soft and flexible by laser- laser cutting conductive fabric in a particular way.

So we're using that to make these soft, flexible circuits, which then we embed in a composite. And it's very useful to have them be made out of textiles because the composite material can soak into the electronics and it doesn't create like a problem with the integrity of the composite really the textile the electronics just kind of become like 100 embedded in the composite because the textiles can just absorb the resin um and then um we're experimenting with essentially composites that can sense their own shape. We're making these kind of custom sensors so that the composite can sense their shape and also kind of the stresses that they're under. So is it being bent in a certain way or is it being stretched in a certain way? Is it about to break? And then we're working with using shape memory alloys to be able to do something so the composite can say, like, oh, sorry.

No, no. But so the composite can say, like, oh, I'm being bent in this way that is going to break me. So I'm going to exert a force to, like, resist that bending and, like, go back to, like, a comfortable shape so I won't get broken. So that's the heart of that project it's like you could also do like a closed feedback loop to okay i want to go to this shape and know i'm in it yeah no we can totally no we can we can um get totally we can get into a shape and then detect that we're in that shape. Or we can like, if we're being bent into that shape and we don't want to be there, try to bend back. Yeah,

totally. I'm thinking of smart sail, sailboats for some reason though. I'm thinking of prosthetics. Well, yes. Okay. What,

when you say composite, what does that mean? It's just a fancy way of saying like a combined materials that is in our case what we're working right with right now is fiberglass and then uh polyester resin okay so we have layers of fiberglass and then we soak it with polyester and it to make this really hard stiff like structurally sound thing but that has these embedded, um, you know, sensors and actuators in it. Would carbon fiber fall under that category as well? Carbon fiber is, um, is, is often used as the, in place of, um, the fiberglass. Okay. Um, the challenge with working

with carbon fiber and why we've kind of skirted it a little bit for the short term is that it's conductive. I didn't know that. Of course it is. Yeah. So you have to like factor that into your design. And there are ways I think that we can actually leverage the fact that it's conductive and it has these interesting electrical properties. But we haven't done that yet. We've kind of just used a non-conductive fiber to avoid that issue for the short term.

Okay, so you make a circuit with a flexible fabric, and then you put fiberglass around it to get something hard. Why didn't you just make a fiberglass PCB? That's what we do essentially so we okay um there's like a sheet of fiberglass um that is like the backing material for everything the then we have to like cut the textile circuit out of a copper fabric and then we adhere that to the fiberglass then we're actually using um this polymerization technique technique to polymerize some of the fiberglass to turn it into a sensor, essentially. And so then we integrate that into the circuit and it is actually the fiberglass. And then we put a bunch more layers of fiberglass.

So a single layer is just not enough for the composite application. So we end up making these composites with like 20 layers or so of fiberglass. And one of those layers is the layer with the circuit. Okay. Christopher, do you have any more questions? I mean, if I keep clicking on different projects on our website, I'm just just gonna keep asking questions there's there's the one with the person child in front of what looks like laser cut amazing curtains uh yeah that's that's my son that's a curtain in my house um that's oh it is a kind of okay yeah yeah So that's like just part of exploring computational design and fabrication. What are your, I guess this is kind of a weird question, but what are your tools that you predominantly use for design?

Like are you living in like Fusion 360? Do you have custom things? I notice on your website you have something called SlabForge, so you're developing some of your own tools. Yeah. So that, you know, that's all over the map right now. What we're exploring is writing a lot of Python code and then using that in Grasshopper and Rhino. So that suite of tools.

Yeah. But there are always like other tool sets to explore. But for the computational design stuff, that's what we've been doing a lot of more lately. Well, I have to say that if I was in New Mexico, I would be wanting to sign up for your research lab. There are so many things there and so many opportunities. It's just, there's a lot of fun. But now we should probably let you get back to making these things instead of just talking to us. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I don't think so. I think that was probably quite enough, but I am looking for graduate students. So if anybody is interested in spending several years playing in the desert, yeah, check out my website and

stop by for a visit. That would be lovely. If we're ever in New Mexico, I know where we have to stop. Our guest has been Professor Leah Beakley, Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of New Mexico, where she directs the Hand and Machine Research Group. Thanks, this was really interesting. Thank you so much. That was really fun. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you for listening.

You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote by Isaac Asimov. Actions such as his could only come from a robot or a very honorable and decent human being. But you see, you can't just differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.