Finished trialling my light-responsive objects that I developed at the AA2A placement and the ISIS Arts mini-residency. My motivation was to make a work that encoded knowledge of natural systems, to create a gentle empathy in the viewer. Over time these devices have transformed themselves in my eyes into pets, or dependant creatures. Although simple, they are evocative, they have metaphorical attachment points for anthropomorphism.Some of the verbal reactions to the work are that they are “sweet”, “cute”, “life-like”. So as well as a model system to learn about interaction, they are also a site of inquiry into human relationships with machines.
Continue reading ‘light-responsive objects using arduino’
Processing.org has a nice video capture library that is suitable for quick videos for documentation, I am using it to capture some arduino experiments with the external isight camera
call and response
code follows….
Continue reading ‘processing as a quick video capture program on OSX’
As part of Inter_Multi_Trans_Actions
First up was Bengt Sjolen(Stockholm)(http://www.automata.se/people/bengt/). He talked about a number of his works including one utilizing a servo-controlled citroen rearvision mirrors (Picture house at Belsay Hall, Northumberland) that used reflection to make a pixelated picture.
An elegant piece was the wifi camera – a single pixel camera that builds up images over a 20 min period of the local wifi environment.
The elephant phone connecting two distant elephant house, allowing the elephants to talk to each other.
One of the take home messages was that time is not money, money is time. So the few months he is working on other people projects buys him the time to make his own(http://www.automata.se/).
He placed an emphasis on peer production networks, in that the network became the artist. This network is sited at Teenageengineering(http://www.teenageengineering.com/), where Bengt and a number of others run their commercial operations(eg http://www.elektron.se).
This is full of useful tech like cnc machine and laser cutters etc. Not coming from a design or manufacturing background I found his brief description of small scale fabrication of circuitboards interesting eg the cnc machine can be used to cut circuit boards, place solder paste and pick and place components, then into the oven.
One of the questions that was directed at Bengt was why if there was software that was off the shelf that could drive his cnc machine, why he chose to code in python.
This gets to the heart of being a tooluser vs a tool maker.
A generic software needs to be generalised, and is often not open to modification. A bespoke software can be built to do what its maker wants.
Bengt mentioned that the process of making the tool slowed him down and thus errors werent made later in the process but as part of the development of the tool. This slight slowdown was preferable to an error at the production level.
This also brings into the debate, should new media artists know how to code? Are the simplified tools that are being provided to us (ie Arduino, Processing) a help or hindrance?
Are we asking for it to be too easy, and losing some of the nuances? This issue came up at the SketchingInteractions and SpacePlacePace events at Culturelab in the previous week.
My take is that the opensource tools arduino and processing allow a gentler introduction to the complexities of microcontrollers and programming than a full blown avr programming suite. At this stage I am not likely to do a 4 year engineering course.
I was at Mashed08 in Alexandra Palace . There is a good mix of hardware and software hackers, but I like the hardware ones best. It’s a bit like working with children ands animals. It should not be done in 24hrs unless you are really experienced. I spent too much time on a prototype when i should have spent time on the sketch, A learning experience, but I did dip into using python to talk to Arduino , and that was a valuable lesson.
My eeepc has a small screen which some programs don’t handle well. The arduino programming environment (the same as processing) doesn’t always handle it very well (like having the scroll bar disappear occasionally). However, it is possible to use an external editor. Personally, I like jedit and its code highlighting. Problem is that it dosen’t recognise the extension *.pde as a c-like style.
Continue reading ’syntax highlighting of arduino code in jedit’
I recently bought an asus eeepc subnotebooks( 4G ssd, 512ram, portable celeron) for a portable blogging computer. I never expected to install processing.org or arduino even though I use them on another computer. However, the people down at the eeepc wiki have posted a method of installing both(here) . I have installed arduino and processing(instructions ) on it. So now I have an ultraportable kit to play with arduino and processing! >> 2kg! Its not a fast system for processing, but adequate for trying out patchs, and fine for communicating with arduino.
Cool.
Now I am working with the kingbright chameleon rgb led modules(available at Maplin and Rapid ), getting arduino to handle the physical interface of controlling the 3 leds(on/off done) and processing.org the mix of colors from an onscreen interface(in the process).
To do this I have used the example code from fading and blink, and merged the different ideas.
I hae also been getting to know led modules, their orientation, the value of the resister needed for each. (ie the Blue operates at a higher voltage than the Red led, needing different resister values).
This is primarily because LEDs do not provide a resistance to current, if the voltage is above the operating voltage of the led, then the led will suck more and more current until it burns out. Thats the reason to put in the resister, it controls the current (usually 20milliamps up to a max of 50milliamps)(some links can be found at http://del.icio.us/sctv search for led.
Will post the code as it gets more mature, for now I am verry happy to have this nice little development package for arduino and processing.
