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Archive for the ‘digital’ Category.
Hey, come check out my arduino project box that I’m working on! That’s what the post about the SPDT switches was all about. 
Here’s a video I made of some of the construction steps:
arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.
I’m working on my arduino project box, specifically the wiring. I ran into a really strange problem with the blue Single-pole-dual-throw (SPDT) switches I had selected for my digital i/o pins. Strange to me until I thought about it, and then I realized how not-strange it is
The problem is that all of my toggle switches were working backwards to my expectations. (If you’re reading this and have already learned this lesson, you know where we’re going. )
Here’s a photo of the switches I’m using (thanks to banzaieffects for having a really nice photo of this component online)
Miyama is the manufacturer… Anyway! Here’s the deal:
I wired things up to what I thought would be a logical way. Wire this to that, just like the slide switches I’d also been using without incident.
Then I had my epiphany about how these toggle switches work. I tried to imagine cutting one in half to visualize how they worked based on the scientific research that had been forced on me. My slide switches work great, but my toggle switches are all working backwards.
Aha, so based on what would now make a lot of sense, if I wanted to have my switches indicate directionality on my panel, I would need to switch how they’re wired on the back of the panel in order to emulate the behavior I want!
And now, look at that. Switching the wires will in fact give me the results I had originally intended, even though it seems like a trick I have to pull on my brain in order to get it to do what I want. Not really, but.. without being able to actually see inside the switch, visually it looks like the opposite of what made sense.
Sooo… yeah, now I have a lot of clean up work to do on my project. Recut and strip a bunch of wires, desolder and remove a bunch of work I’ve already done… sigh… Oh well. Such is the price of Doing It Yourself. my hard lesson learned will hopefully translate into less of a mystery for you.
Technorati Tags: arduino, componentry, design, DIY, diy, electronic, howto, panel, programming, wiring
here’s a sneak peek at a font I hope to release later this year. it’s a block letter wildstyle. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of typeface for a long time, and fontstruct seems to be one way to get it done. It’s a little stiffer than I’d prefer it be, but I’ll see it through and maybe take another stab at it later in life.
Technorati Tags: fonts, fontstruct
My brother in law Justin is working on a short film. I just got the green light to post it, so here it is.
Eden (4th pass rough cut) from Justin Kane on Vimeo.
Technorati Tags: justinkane
So I did some user testing at my brother in law’s company and got paid properly, so I ordered a few of the t-shirts that I’ve been designing over the past 5 years or so but haven’t had a chance to actually purchase. Since black t-shirts are the best thing since sliced bread, that’s pretty much all I’m designing for anymore. Several companies are offering up print on demand t-shirts now. Recently, there was some magical improvement to print white ink onto dark garments as part of the process (thank you, alpha channel), and then just industrial-ink-jet-print as usual, and probably some kind of heat-setting process to lock it all into the fibers of the shirt.
So! part one of my research will cover Zazzle.com’s quality. In fact, I can tell you that that Zazzle already has one thing going for it over cafe press: I ordered t-shirts on the same day, early in the day, from both sites, and my zazzle order showed up today. No cafe press shirts so far.
While I’m waiting for my other order to show up, let’s take a look at how Zazzle did.
Overall, I’m happy with the quality of the print. When I look at the results from a north-american-personal-space distance away, the print resolution looks fine. When I just look down at the shirt while wearing it, it’s very pixelated. I know for a fact from over a decade of professional experience that my graphics are *not* low res… so I’m guessing that due to the sheer volume of work that their printers are subjected to that they have an automated process of de-rezing everyone’s graphics. Probably especially people like me, who intentionally load the absolute maximum resolution image size the system would accept. So, all in all, acceptable.
Once I wash these I’ll report back to see how well they handle it.
Price is one of the ways that Zazzle and Cafe Press differ. Zazzle says “hey! thanks for designing something with our system! Someone bought one of your things,so here’s a tiny tiny tiny commission.” They do give you a “discount” to buy your own stuff, but for some reason it calculated the discounts unequally when I ordered one of each of these two designs. I don’t know what the story is there, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. No doubt these shirts are sort of a luxury because they run near $20 each with shipping, so it’s sort of a big commitment.
I’ll cover how cafe press handles price and commissions… when my order arrives.
Technorati Tags: cafepress, design, printondemand, zazzle
As of version 0011 of the IDE, you can now allegedly program arduino boards like the modern device bare bones board via the ICSP pins. This is way cool. Now you can supposedly forego the FTDI cable and just get a programmer box like LadyAda’s USBTinyISP, AND get the benefit of being able to program other AVR chips and circuits if you get beyond the Arduino.
I haven’t tried this out yet, but it’s exciting news! Here’s the link to the instructions for setup. And here is the forum topic where I got the confirmation.
Technorati Tags: arduino, ladyada, moderndevice, USBTinyISP
James just wrote me to tell of a really interesting event coming up regarding open second life servers…
Ars Virtua & The CADRE Laboratory for New Media will host a workshop on open source alternatives to the Second Life(TM) grid, in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge.
This two hour workshop provides an overview of open-source, third-party virtual-world server technology based on Second Life(TM), and the opportunities afforded to artists and experimenters who are now able to cheaply host tailored synthetic spaces.
The first hour will be devoted to a brief overview of Second Life and the “OpenMetaverse” initiatives (libsl, opensim, etc.) Bennett Goble of Ars Virtua will discuss features and show demos of the most popular alternatives (OpenSim, OpenLife & realXtend), their qualities, strengths etc.
We will consider the issues surrounding installation, maintenance and function of the OpenSim server and will be connecting participants through third-party clients and through modifications of the Linden Lab Second Life client.
During this session participants will have an opportunity to look at code, and to consider the space as a place for artistic experimentation and collaboration. Special consideration will be given to coding within the environment and control afforded by building and running servers.
…
The workshop will be held from noon - 2 p.m. Friday June 6 in room 237 of the art building on SJSU campus. This workshop is free and open to the public.
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click through to learn more about it. It sounds really awesome.
Technorati Tags: opensim, second life
And so it begins.. what was once a neat trick now becomes a real feature. Build 3d stuff in a “real” 3d drawing program, and export it to a set of data that Second Life can translate into OpenGL primitives. Good. Now, Google, command-c, command-v, command-option-s… Oh, wait, does that conflict with google earth interests? I’ll have to ask Nate about that.
(click here if the movie doesn’t play)
Technorati Tags: geometry, export, second life
I did this painting at this month’s First Friday live painting event at Works/San Jose. I’d be happy to sell it to you.
And then I’m into all kinds of new new new new stuff thanks to my training at Techshop. Here’s some acrylic test pieces. I’m over the moon on the cut quality on these. I have some fairly big ideas that I’m going to try out on this front.
Here are some larger hardboard abstracts that I’ll be sealing and painting. I’m so excited to be able to get this level of precision into my build quality. Once I paint them, I think that will be a nice combination of machine precision and human imprecision :
And then we’re working on a mobile for our coming addition to our family. Here’s the first pass at the cast of characters. I output these at 100% of the design spec, but we both agree that I can redo these and bump up the size. A lot. Although, I’m totally shocked at the fidelity to the design that the combination of the laser cutter working on the 1/4″ hardboard can reproduce. I probably just got lucky with where I put the holes and how much space I added around them.
check out the detail:
Note the circles at the white arrows. No problem at all. Every one of the holes I put into the pieces produced a clean 1/4″ thick hardboard peg. I love this machine. It’s freakin’ awesome.
Technorati Tags: art, epilog, fine art, techshop
Works/San Jose
