hda1; design, geekery and ranting

GraphJam for Life!!!

My friend Laurence bought my attention to an awesome little microblogging service that doesn’t use words. It’s called mycrocosm and allows the user to easily graph their lives.

My little example below charts my drinks percentage.

Updating your graphs is as easy as updating a twitter feed, as in you just chuck the correct tag into a text box and it counts the it as a hit and updates your chart. In fact you can even set it up to listen to your Twitter feed, then all you have to do to update your charts is send Mycrocosm a direct message.

It is this easy integration with Twitter that excites me, because it opens up a whole world of integration with hardware. Couple this service with an Arduino, a few sensors and a simple web server you could graph pretty much anything.

I’m off to clean myself up, I think I just had a geekgasm….

wow yet more Arduino/Processing stuff

It would seem that not a day will pass at the moment that the Arduino/Processing ecosystem doesn’t expand with a cool new app/hardware update/library/whatever. The latest to come into range of my Radar is Fritzing, an open source circuit sketching application, again aimed at artists/designers, it allows you to draw your breadboarded design on to a virtual breadboard and it will then work out your schematic, and a circuit board layout, and from that export to an Eagle file for sending off to a prototyping house (such as www.batchpcb.com/) to be made into a permenant board, meaning you have a robust device.

I won’t pretend the software is perfect, it’s still in alpha with all the reliablility issues that entails, the 64 bit Linux version didn’t run at all, and the 32 bit seems to have its share of bugs too. However the interface itself seems to be very intuitive I already have a preliminary layout for an Arduino sheild I am planning. The only major problems at the moment that I can see is a lack of facility for editing the board layout, adding extra pads etc, and a lack of pre-built components. Though the components are only .svg graphics with attached xml files, and the team promise that the priority for the next release will be the development of a built in editor to make defining new bits a breeze.

As ever I will furnish you with more updates as and when they become available.

RepRap, and Sanguino

For those of you not already in the know RepRap stands for (self) REPlicatingRAPid (prototyper) in other words a 3d printer that can be built from spares printed on another RepRap, bits you buy from a hardware store and order from somewhere like RS, check out the link to their site, they explain it better than I’ll ever be able to. The upshot of this is it’s an open source project that has the potential to bring rapid 3d printing to the masses, making a lot easier to design and build your own gadgets, bringing micro-scale mass production to the masses. Which for a gadget addict like me is awesome, not only do you get to build an awesome machine in itself, but that machine will then build custom components for further gadgets! Getting away from the fact that this is a brilliant thing in itself, I truly believe that this could revolutionise the way we manufacture things, not just in the western world but in the third world too.

Anyway, enough of my lefty/liberal rantings and on to the purpose of this post. The RepRap now has it’s own dedicated motherboard, recently they switched to using a couple of Arduinos to interface the printer with the computer, now they have a dedicated Sanguino (Sanguino is basically an arduino board on steroids) that has space on board for an SD card slot making it possible for the printer to drive itself, thereby lowering the cost of ownership, and the minimum power requirements to run the the thing. Say you had a communal village PC in some remote place that people could use to design their widgets on, you can then take your widget design back to your house on an sd card, plug it into your RepRap, set it printing and a few hours later … Hey Presto, new plumbing fittings, or whatever.

Arduino Midi Shield

The title says it all really, I was googling my way through the boredom of not enough to do at work today when I came across this delightful looking arduino shield, perfect for building custom controllers and lighting interfaces. I can’t wait for the kits to become available so I can have a play :D.

As you can see the fully populated board already has 2 pushbuttons and 2 pots as standard, but according to the post these can be left off if you want to use those inputs for other things, which is nice, I’ll be very interested in seeing what comes of this, and as ever I’ll keep you posted of any further developments.

Interesting new Arduino project.

First things first, in the interests of total disclosure I feel I must mention before writing this post that the guy behind the project I am writing about is one of my best mates.

That out of the way, head over to <a href=”http://www.eclipseaudioservices.co.uk/extras/helicopter.html”>http://www.eclipseaudioservices.co.uk/extras/helicopter.html</a> and take a look at the latest arduino shield project, The Helishield. Built to house a gyro and acellerometer available from <a href=”http://www.sparkfun.com”>Sparkfun</a> this shield, when coupled with an arduino should allow you to convert your plain old remote control helicopter in into an autonomous flying deathbot!!! errr an autonomous flying robtics platform. I can see all sorts of uses for this, from autonomous camera platforms to robot-racing. It’s going to be awesome.

I for one welcome our flying microprocessor-driven overlords.

More on Processing

For those of you that know me, you will no doubt aware of the fact that I am a Designer, and as such I find anything codebased, beyond JavaScript and CSS, a struggle. However I have found a language that I can actually use and understand. It is called <a href=”http://www.processing.org”>Processing</a> and I must say, not only has it caught my imagination, but it has also held my interest long enough for me to get a decent hold on how it works. So much that now I am on the hunt for a project to allow me to mash data on to some sort of web app to put my new found hobby to work.

Which brings me on to one of the many cool things about Processing, it’s based on Java so it’s easy to export it as a file to embedd into a webpage!! Mix that with the fact that does 3d out of the box and it just turned 1.0 recently means it can only get better, and that really excites me…

But I race ahead of myself, “what the hell is Processing?” I hear you ask, well, I’m glad you asked, to quote directly from the website…

“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.”

The most Important part of this for me, as a designer and someone who is accustomed to finding crayola up his nose on regular basis is the fact that the entire slant of this language is toward producing quick visual applications, they are even referred to as sketches for gods sake. This isn’t just window-dressing eitherI can honestly say within a week of picking this up I am now producing apps that take mouse input and translate into colours and positions on the screen. Which is further than I have ever got trying to use actionScript 3 in the joyless abortion that is Flash CS3.

In other words, Processing is awesome. I thouroughly recommended it to anyyone who wants to produce quick and easy Visuals. My next adventure will be to get live sound input working…

Processing, Arduino and PureData

Quick KDE 4 Update