Following up on the initial post about the brauswitch – the eyebrow activated headband switch. Here is some video with a simple application demonstrating it’s use. There are separate switches for both the left and right sides. The simple Arduino code listed below will indicate if the left, right or both sides have been activated. A Processing sketch reads the serial output of the device and plays a variety of sound samples.

There is something really nice about the amplification of a small facial movement and the larger audio/visual response of the sketch. It’s also nice to interact in a handsfree way. Oh! Fun. Code after the video. (more…)

I’ve wanted to try another geocode mashup since the Where We Were project I ran at Moore College. I recently picked up a GPS unit, which got me thinking about it anew.

For the M5 Bus trip assignment for our Applications class I worked up a mix of Twitter, GPS location, digital photos and Google Maps. I had previously synchronized the clocks for the camera, phone and TomTom GPS unit…and used these timestamps later to literally mash the Twitter XML and TomTom GPX files together with a custom Java application. Geocoding the photographs was done using the gpsdings java application.

Google Maps will display carefully formed KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files, which is nice because Google Earth can open the same file.

The project is available at http://robertcarlsen.net/m5. Although this entry is focused specifically on the technical side, I welcome comments here on the thoughts presented on the project page.

Inspired by Johnny Lee’s wiimote hacking, but disappointed that the code sample was written in C# I decided to use the available libraries for connecting to the wiimote and write a head tracking sketch in Java (Processing libs in Eclipse).

Most of the struggle is that I’m not really proficient in pure Java (more…)

Trying to migrate my knowledge of Processing into Java and the Eclipse development environment. This is Ben Fry’s zipcode lookup applet as described in “Visualizing Data”. There are some oddities in my implementation of it, perhaps due to my inexperience with vanilla Java and a shoddy porting of his code.

Oh well, I’ll tinker with it later.

Applet and code