TRIKE WRITER
水书法器
TRIKE WRITER is a project by Nicholas Hanna. When living in Beijing, Nicholas was intrigued by the water calligraphy he saw performed by people in parks around his neighbourhood. Inspired by this practice, he built the original Water Calligraphy Device, and later the Trike Writer.
Trike Writer
A quick overview of what the Trike Writer does
水书法器 Water Calligraphy Device
The original Water Calligraphy Device performing in Beijing.
2011
Trike Writer + Aclima
We collaborated with Aclima to integrate one of their air quality sensor nodes with the Trike Writer. This enabled the Trike Writer to sense environmental factors around it and print real-time air quality data on the street as it traveled through CicLAvia, a bicycle transportation event in Los Angeles.
2016
Trike Writer + Qualcomm Inventor Lab
We were invited by Qualcomm to become part of their Inventor Lab. This sponsorship allowed us to reinvent the original Water Calligraphy Device as the "Trike Writer" — a new, wireless-enabled water printer. The Trike Writer participated in Maker Faire San Diego. Visitors were able to send messages to it wirelessly through their phones, which the Trike Writer would then print on the ground in front of them.
2015
About Trike Writer
Trike Writer is inspired by the Chinese custom of writing calligraphy on the ground in public places using a brush dipped in water. When the artist was living in Beijing in 2011, he enjoyed seeing people practice water calligraphy in local parks. This inspired him to build the original Water Calligraphy Device, a tricycle that writes on the street with droplets of water. Trike Writer is the second iteration of a project, and was developed with the support of the Qualcomm Inventor Lab.
Trike Writer is controlled by a computer running custom software written by the artist. The software interprets characters and converts them into patterns of dots. A reservoir of pressurized water is distributed through a bank of 16 valves which release sprays of water. As the tricycle moves forward, the valves are rapidly turned on and off in a manner similar to a dot-matrix printer. This allows the device to write characters and words on the ground behind it. The characters printed by the device are legible for roughly fifteen minutes before they evaporate.
The first Water Calligraphy Device was built and performed in Beijing in 2011. This second version, named Trike Writer, was built in Los Angeles in 2015 by the artist with support from the Qualcomm Inventor Lab using the advanced DragonBoard 410C running a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
Special thanks to SpecialGuest ;)