11 Jan 2009 Not much to say about today. I spent the whole day in camp, and much of it in the bathroom, getting intimate…
Comments closedhello. Posts
10 Jan 2009 Went out to observe wooly monkeys with Tony, Mauricio, Peter. Attempted to track groups G and Y. They used radio collar receiver,…
Comments closedHC Gilje’s wind-up bird(s) is an environmental sound work installed in a forest in Lillehammer, Norway. It’s a flock of mechanical woodpeckers that communicate via…
Comments closedThere are certain project themes that recur every year in physical computing classes. Many of them are ideas that lend themselves to multiple interesting variations, and are valuable ways to learn about physical interaction through doing. Others don’t offer only limited interactive possibilities, but capture the popular imagination because they’re simple and quite often pretty to look at. What follows is a review of some of the themes I see frequently. These are by no means the only themes that come up, nor are they the only things you can do with physical computing. Many physical computing projects feature two or more of these themes.
Sometimes when people learning about physical computing hear that a particular idea has been done before, they give up on it, because they think it’s not original. What’s great about the themes that follow here is that they allow a lot of room for originality. Despite their perennial recurrence, they offer surprises each time they come up. So if you’re new to physical computing and thinking to yourself “I don’t want do to that, it’s already done,” stop thinking that way! There’s a lot you can add to these themes through your variation on them.
Comments closedHere’s a handy little data source, probably fun for webscraping and visualizations: http://www.worldometers.info/. Thanks to Kristin O’Friel for the link.
Comments closedA few people have asked what I thought of the Greener Gadgets conference. The short answer is: had a good time, glad I went, it…
Comments closedIt’s basically an open design for actrive RFID:”OpenBeacon is a free design for an active RFID device which operates in the 2.4GHz ISM band…. The intention of this project is to offer a wide range of use cases such as visitor or item tracking and wireless remote control with a free self-contained and low-cost RFID design.”Thanks to Massimo Banzi for the link.
Comments closedBen Hopson has a good site detailing his work on his masters’ thesis at Pratt on designing movements.
Comments closedSketching in Hardware 1 (Sketching06) was a very useful workshop. Hosted by Mike Kuniavsky at the Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan in June 2006, it was a meeting of a handful of microcontroller module developers, teachers, and hardware designers. There was much conversation about what makes good microcontroller hardware, how best to teach it, and what we can do to make some of the various platforms out there more interoperable. I won’t repeat everyone elses’s comments, but below are some of the links that have come up.
Technorati Tags: electronics, open source, pcomp, physical computing, puppy, sketching
Comments closedFrom their site: “NeuroSky, a fabless semiconductor/module company, has developed a non-invasive neural sensor and signal processing technology that converts brainwaves and eye movements into useful electronic signals to communicate with a wide range of electronic devices, consoles, and computers.” So far they haven’t got any links to an actual product for sale up.
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