after a couple of late nights, i have a proof-of-concept in the real-time cycling-related datalogging. the reasons behind the project are still getting sorted, but lately my interest in ubiquitous urban sensor networks has been piqued and this is a tentative exploration in that area. sensors don’t have to remain static as part of physical infrastructure…millions of people are carrying millions of sensors around with them daily. (more…)

Had a really nice time tonight at the oF knitting circle held at Parsons in NYC. Saw several really inspiring projects and spoke to several people about using openFrameworks for iPhone development and showed the current version of the particle game using ofxiPhoneAlertView.

Quite a few folks mentioned that they have become interested in openFrameworks after hearing about it’s use for creating iPhone applications. While not every app is suitable, I saw a few really nice examples. My only regret is not getting the name of the fellow who was working with creating a sound wrapper.

The wiki page for the knitting circle is at the openFrameworks wiki.

BarCampNYC4 was hosted by ITP on May 30-31st. It was a great event – I’d highly recommend going to another one.

I did a presentation titled “Using openFrameworks for iPhone App Development” which I think went well, although it was quite dense. Can’t be helped, I suppose. The walk-through of getting set up with openFrameworks has been previously posted, and is also available on ITPedia. Below is an embedded video of the presentation thanks to Mark B… and New Work City. (more…)

nyc resistor had one of their craft nights last evening, where they invite folks to come in to work on just about anything “so you don’t have to make stuff by yourself.” i had been missing my community fix now that ITP is on winter break, so heading over there to assemble my new meggy jr rgb kit from evil mad scientist seemed like the things to do. (more…)

In conducting research for the CycleSense bicycle traffic proximity system I gathered data about the amount of space behind a bicycle rider traveling through typical New York City traffic at various times and locations. The initial visualization of this data was to graph the distances over time to look for specific events that the system would need to detect in order to be useful. I cross-referenced the space data with video taken on the same rides

(more…)

This evening is the first night of the 2008 Winter Show at ITP. My Cloud Reader project has been included, and I’ll be attending to it each night in the main hallway – surrounded by other really interesting work. The atmosphere on the floor last night was energized…almost like a festival. I’m excited for the show, having come full circle from one year ago when I visited ITP just before applying to the program.

It doesn’t really feel that long ago; it also feels like a long time ago.

It’s going to be a long and exciting day.

this saturday i participated in the elmo hacking workshop at eyebeam. adrianne wortzel , a resident at eyebeam, has a project which involves synchronizing the movements of 50 tickle-me elmos. mike gazes and soyoung park realized adrianne’s idea by reverse engineering the elmo’s and creating a new control unit based around an atmel atmega168, using the arduino development environment. wireless communication is through xbee radios (so many (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.

i hate losing things….in this case my house keys and special lever for my bicycle wheels. my exhaustion and a faulty carabiner keychain conspired to drop my keys on the NYC sidewalk with me unawares. i didn’t realize it until i was standing at my doorstep in greenpoint at 3am, in the cold and windy night. in the end, although i had to ride 25 minutes back to school (and then home again) at least my keys were still there….

there was a jubilant feeling in the air as i rode home through the streets of new york. union square was completely choked with revelers, frequently cheering and chanting.

spontaneous and sporadic cheers or calls of “obama” pierced the night. (more…)