transitlab

25 Jul, 2008

Bio-Fi workshop @ ISEA2008

Posted by: sctv In: art|conference

Douglas Easterly at the Biofi workshop. Here he is holding an arduino and explaining how great microcontrollers are.

I am attending the Bio-Fi workshop at Republica Polytechnica in Singapore, run by Doug, Matt and Kathrine from swamp.nu

During the workshop we are learning about php and how it can be used for data scraping (e.g. maybe we want to get the pollution/particulate value for a LA highway from the pollution website).

What do we want to do with that?

Well……we can use it to activate an arduino board. The arduino can drive a simple transmitter that talks to a Bio-Fi module. This module is attached to a essential oil vapouriser…. Cool!

Di Ball has a picture of the back of my head at the workshop here.

Tags: art, bio-fi, conference, Isea2008, Singapore, swamp, workshop

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About

Brian Degger is a technologist/artist, he writes, thinks and makes around themes of interactivity, biomimicracy, and collaboration

Asides

PDF import and editing in openoffice
One function I have found useful in openoffice is the ability to import pdfs. This is possible by downloading and installing the pdfimport plugin. This means that you can import a pdf, edit it then output it at a lower resolution for screen. (0)

miniFM

In the foreground is a Tetsuo Kogawa version (built during RadioCraftLab, during AVFest08) and in the back the remix by sonodrome (built last week at Sonodrome Central). Both assembled by me.

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Bioplastic
Jay Cousins and friends had a hackday around bioplastics and laser cutting. Making the bioplastic from starch and glycerin (see this link for more details) and then laser cutting them. Cool stuff, they were even making different color ones. This is important as people move from using commercially sourced plastic in their makerbots to something else. Plastic is expensive to buy for these machines, but it is all around. SO be it bio-plastic or post waste plastic, ways of reusing these provide a compelling reason to throw away less waste. It is amazing that these materials are coming out of the factories, to be used in domestic situations. Together with polymorph and sugru, there are a variety of materials to play around for wearables, for prototypes and one offs. Bring on the future, with peer production.

Maker Faire Newcastle is March 13-14, 2010 (makezine.com)
Bioplastics – the quest for Open Source material production (jaycousins.wordpress.com)

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augmented foraging - cool use of layar -

augmented foraging Originally uploaded by _foam A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources.

Amsterdam urban_ edibles is developing Augmented_Foraging, a mobile phone guide to wild-food sources using Layar. Much better use of this program than finding property in Amsterdam (unless you live there of course)!

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Bio-Fi workshop @ ISEA2008