Alex and I have been developing the plans for the blocks in preparation for building the prototypes in the next week. For this, I built the community edition of QCad (open source FTW!) and have been teaching myself how to draw with it. There was a bit of a learning curve to the interface and the modal model of the application tools, but I’m now relatively comfortable with the basics. (more…)
I’ve had a few days to test the libraries I cobbled together for using openFrameworks with iPhone and also received positive reports from some folks who tried out the Makefiles I provided to them, so here they are for anyone who’s willing to try them out. -please make these instructions better if you see fit- (more…)
I’ve heard about openFrameworks 0.6 (as of yet unreleased) and specifically efforts to support building apps using oF for the iPhone. There are a few developers who have published videos of their efforts and even several apps in the AppStore.
Memo Atken has a very informative article about setting up the prerelease 0.6 version for use with the ofxiPhone addon. However, there is a HUGE simplification of the steps necessary for getting the supporting libraries installed for use with iPhone.
Update: freetype/freeimage building instructions have been posted. (more…)
(ITP 4-in-4 day 4+1, or how i learned to stop worrying and love blowing deadlines)
to complete the signal to noise meter previously posted i wrote up an apple script which calculates a ratio of messages in my mail inbox to the junk messages which have been caught. the apple script then sends that ratio via serial to the signal to noise meter. i’ve set up a rule in mail.app to trigger the script every time a message comes in. the serial output (ascii only, it seems) is thanks to SerialPort X.
it’s certainly not perfect…having a lot of read messages stagnating in the inbox brings the ratio down…but i’m posting the code below so maybe someone can figure a better way.
also, the script wasn’t triggering when called directly from mail’s rules…my workaround was to have a launcher script run ‘do shell script “osascript ” signalToNoise.scpt’. for some reason this worked when the launcher script was triggered by mail – YMMV.
oh! it just when off as i was writing this entry…the light came on, and the needle swung high….i need to clean out the junk mail!
code after the break (i always wanted to write “after the break”)
For today’s project I wanted to do something with the analog decibel meter that Tymm gave me on day one. My idea is to calculate some kind of signal to noise ratio in my email inbox and to display the value on this physical meter. Since I already get a lot of noise in there, maybe the value won’t change very dynamically, but be a steady din. Perhaps I could tie into the junk mail filter to show just how much work it’s doing, like a tachometer. Who am I kidding, really, I’m likely going to jump into what all the cool kids are doing and just come up with some type of Twitter visualization… (more…)
Spent most of the day at Tymm’s house, pretending to participate in 4-in-4, but mostly drinking coffee and watching videos. I did eventually get around to tinkering with my new Meggy Jr RGB from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. The Meggy is a pixel game platform built around a vivid 8×8 LED matrix running an Arduino compatible ATMega168. EMSL has also released a simple to use library for managing the display, buttons and speaker. It’s really a great kit.
I decided to ignore all the nice easy stuff (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…)
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 got around to working directly with the Arduino’s microchip, the ATmega168, and built my first Arduino on a breadboard. part of the reason is cost…an Arduino Diecimila is $30, even the Barebones Arduino and similar clones are about $15. A raw ATmega168 chip is about $4, and the remaining parts (sans breadboard) are about $3 – so for $7 i can build a circuit around the Arduino’s chip and use the same programming environment.
the main reason to do this is flexibility. i can build ad hoc prototype circuits for individual projects relatively cheaply. also, if i fry a microcontroller it’s just a simple matter to swap it for a new one (which is also true of the packaged Arduino variants. (more…)
Started up working with basic motor control, ended up hacking into an existing Halloween candy bowl talking skull.
