I a massed all the raw stock material from OnlineMetals.com

One aspect of this project was to make a "run", i.e. more than one or two parts. I started with the Petal Support member. Each "flower" has 5 of these "petals" so that meant I needed 60 parts. I ended up making a few more in case I screwed anything up later and also to have some spare parts. 

I made a jig to hold the blanks and used the rotary to get both sides. It took about 15 mins per part, but after several hours I had 64 done.

Next I had to mill a slot at the pivot end, so I had to make another fixture and run a other op. 

I had this idea. It's about data visualization. 

My basic proposition is that most folks don't like analyzing data, don't really understand graphs and don't have the patience to figure it out. Along with this is a literal tsunami of data coming at us from sources such as the internet of things (IOT). So how does a normal person "grok" the information signal buried in the data? 

Let's say you're monitoring your household electrical consumption, and you happen to have a PV Solar system too. Let's also imagine you have a data logger such that you are capturing how much you're consuming, how much you're generating and, by subtraction, how much you're purchasing from the grid.  Now you could generate a graph to show the system performance.

However, that's sort of geeky. I decided to approach this problem in the form of a data driven sculpture. The idea would be to have the state - say what it looks like, sounds like, etc - attempt to convey the information signal in the data. So lets say you change the position of an element as one vector. And you can change the color, brightness and period (if you want a blink effect) of an LED as a second vector. So a happy system - i.e. one where the sun is shining, plenty of power is being made and you're not using too much sets the state of the sculpture in an "open" and bright color mode. And a sad system - i.e. sun is shining, but very little power is being generated (maybe due to a failure of some type) the state is "closed" and the LED is off or glowing dull red. So the casual observer could potentially figure out the meaning of the two states. 

What I've chosen to do is to make a kind of flower where the petals can open and close and the bud area is illuminated with 5 RGB LEDs. I plan to make a dozen of 'em. I started working on this idea during Dec of '16 and it's been a pretty slow roll. I guess I'm in no hurry. Here's a few pics of the prototype: