Sidiros is one my favourite projects that never happened. It utilises the realtime creation of magnetic fields to manipulate ferrofluid into an always transforming live scupture. IIt was realised at my artistic residency at Artificial Rome, over a period of two, on again off again, years. The premise was that a person would walk up to a tank filled with ferrofluid, he would get facetracked (in the face) and his face would be presented as solidified ferrofluid.
The Machine
As part of the Sidiros project that we are developing with Artificial Rome, there was a need to drive a very large amount of electromagnets, in a very confined space. This very versatile circuit design gave the solution to the problem. It is able to drive 32 unidirectional electromagnets or motors of up to 1 ampere each.
It comes equiped with the shift registers, to drive those motors with 4 lines of code from the arduino . With 4 wires from the arduino and daisy chaining multiple boards , we are currenty driving 160 bi polarity magnets with one arduino. Also very good to work in parralel mode if a more powerfull than 1ampere motor is needed.
