October 2008

The Archives

10.25.08

Impressing Barbie (Stop-Motion) Communications Lab | (0)
Cameron Kunduff and my stop motion. Unfortunately, iStop Motion bombed during the shoot. Despite all of the cmd+s keystrokes, half the footage was lost. We shot a few scenes after the loss, but instead of going through all of the frustration of reshooting the same footage, we chose to have fun with the foley. I'm still a bit bummed about the pitfalls - Cam & I have a very similar sense of humor, so the hardest thing was staying focused. There were some remarkable symbiotic digressions, so another collabo might be an order. Enjoy.
10.24.08

Transis-tore me a new one Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
Seriously frustrating. I understand them, and yet, they didn't want to work. We wanted to use transistors to open & close our electromagnet circuits, but when we sent a HIGH value from our digital pinout, no current was flowing into our electromagnets. We then tried plugging in a simple LED where the lightbulb or EM would've been, with a resistor of course, but to no avail. We switched breadboards, transistors (3 or 4!), all leads, pwoer supplies, power adaptors. Kate mentioned testing the digital pinout by running it through an LED to ground. So that's first on our list when we ...
10.24.08

Magneto Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
I'm still running on fumes, but I know that there's no getting up tomorrow morning. I don't have powerpoint installed on this new(er) laptop, but the presentation will be up in the next day or so. I spoke to Dan Shiffman today about further customizing his brightness mirror patch. We wanted to have a mouse & keypressed function to freezeframe, which ordinarily we would use a pause() command, but since the Capture class doesn't have said f(x), Dan suggested we save the frame as a PImage file that we can use to fake a pause. Once we can get the transistors working, ...
10.23.08

Electro-Magnate Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
It's 8:08 AM... yes people, 808. and i did consume 8+8 caffeinated beverages over the course of the last 22 hours I've been P-Comping. I'm not great on documentation after I crash out, but here's some Arduino code. int incomingByte = 0; //servo variables int servoPin = 2; // Control pin for servo motor int minPulse = 500; // Minimum servo position int maxPulse = 2500; // Maximum servo position int pulse = 0; // Amount to pulse the servo int increment = 50; //there are 40 gear teeth of planar movement //the servo has 2000 explicit values //this means 1 tooth is our greatest resolution of ...

Tagged: itp, magnet, Physical Computing, pin model
10.16.08

Pin Sculpture Prototype Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
We've come a long way this week, but let me explain from where we were a few days ago. The idea was to create a way that a person can comfort another, in a way that audio and video don't achieve. Ideally, it would take a 3-dimensional impression of your hand (or whatever you put on it, the cat?), process the values that would then be sent to your chat buddy's computer, then rendered to their 3d surface. This means a soldier can understand the size of his newborn's foot and people can literally hold hands across the world. When Juri, Diana ...
10.09.08

PComp – Midterm Brainstorm Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
I really responded to Juri's idea of a surface that would let a user interact with someone who is far away. As some of you know, my girlfriend is in Holland, and as great as video chatting may be, it lacks physicality - sometimes you just need an embrace, or more simply, a hand to hold. The 3d pin model I've had as a kid is still impressive visually, and I'd love to figure out how to read in a 3d shape, process it and update one of these pin sculptures to the specifications of the original shape. After asking around at ...
10.09.08

Serial Communication Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
A great milestone has passed - Processing & Arduino are finally on speaking terms. What does this mean? One can finally have something they physically constructed control software, and therefor control a computer, or have an intricate piece of software control something physical. To graph the input voltage of a sensor, we change the type of serial communication from decimal to byte. While this renders the Arduino information useless, we get a much more useful graph in Processing. [caption id="attachment_105" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="this is your byte on drugs"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_106" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Real-time graphs are much better at understanding your sensor"][/caption] In this instance ...
10.09.08

Rattler-Bot Physical Computing, Uncategorized | (0)
My intention was to use a servo motor to rattle a snake tail necklace that I have. I envisioned a shoe-box marked "DANGER" that hid an ultra-sonic sensor, which upon detecting the close proximity of a curious ITP student, would rattle the tail. I couldn't find my snake necklace, so I fashioned a rattle from some plastic tubing, lamp chain & wood scraps (oops, Sara I still have your green screwdriver). This fabrication took abnormally long since the screw for the servo attachments does not like to thread tightly, and after a very long series of trials and errors, I just ...
10.06.08

Delete Your History Communications Lab, Uncategorized | (0)
[caption id="attachment_94" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="... and clear your cache"][/caption]