electrons

android / atoms / electrons — 7 Comments
12
May 11

Chocolate & Peanut Butter

chocolatepbIn the opening day Google I/O Keynote, Android announced numerous cool new products. I had the pleasure of introducing our new Movie Rental Service for Android Market, and we also talked about our new Music Beta service as well as the Accessory Development Kit for the first time. Combining devices with cloud services is a Chocolate & Peanut Butter experience – each benefits from the other to create a whole larger than the sum of their parts, so I wanted to try out the ADK and do a project that captures this. My buddy Joe hooked me up with an ADK board a week before I/O so I could play around with the ADK and I did a project that combines the coolness of devices and hardware with the awesome new Music Beta service.

First a little background on the ADK. The board that Google was handing out at I/O is based on Arduino and has a built-in Circuits@Home USB Host shield. The details can be found at the Android Open Accessory page at the Android Developer portal. A library is provided for the Arduino board that allows you to identify your device and very easily detect when an Android Device is connected to it and transfer data.

I already had a box of Sure Electronics LED matrices left over from Maker Faire last year. That plus some ShiftBrite RGB LEDs and the judicious application of a laser beam to build an acrylic enclosure was sufficient to get the basic sign up and running. It sported a two-line display (64×8 pixels each) driven by my LED Matrix Library and a Music Beta by Google logo backlit through a diffuser panel by 6 ShiftBrites.

Then I linked to the Android ADK library and it was literally just a few lines of code to detect a device connection and read some data. The other very cool feature of Android Open Accessory is you can provide a URL in your device description metadata. When a user plugs in their Android Phone, if there isn’t a compatible application for your device the user can follow the link to download the supporting application directly from Android Market. In my case, I needed a simple service application that listened to the Intents the Music App sends when it changes track metadata. Then, the app writes the metadata to the Arduino board. So the end-user experience is seamless – anyone can walk up to the sign and plug in their phone and be up and running in a few seconds.

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Once I’ve decompressed from I/O a bit, I’ll publish the source code and CAD files so others can put one of these together. For now here’s a video of the Music Beta Now Playing accessory in action. The fun spectrum analyzer animation is just for effect – it’s not actually analyzing the audio, but maybe some clever person can make that part more real.

 

atoms / electrons / pop culture — 3 Comments
15
Aug 10

Corporate Art

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The company-for-which-I-used-to-work has quite a nice art collection. There is a wide variety of art in all the buildings ranging from paintings, prints, sculpture, mixed media, etc. I just ran across some photos I took about a year ago when I travelled to a remote office. This was a building that had just been finished and they commissioned some very cool artwork for it.

The first is an interactive multi-story LED wall that hangs from the atrium ceiling. At varying times of the day you will find different animations and other abstract graphics being displayed on the wall. It turns out that it’s interactive and uses microphones and video cameras to pick up input from the seating area in the atrium that sometimes affects what’s displayed.

I took some close-up pictures of the LED elements themselves from the second-floor walkway that goes closest to the wall. Unfortunately you can’t see much detail from the fuzzy mobile phone picture, but it consists of a series of discrete LED modules in long plastic tubes.

IMG_0071There was a particle effect animation running the day I was there. I’ve since seen a number of other animations and abstract images displayed there, some of which react to the sound and movement. The video below gives a decent idea of the size and bad-assedness of this installation.

But my favorite by far is not the wall of LEDs, but rather a piece of artwork made from beads. No, my blog password was not stolen by a 70 year old cat lady. I was truly awestruck when I saw the bead art in the lobby, as it presses a couple of my joy buttons simultaneously. First, it’s got the “things as pixels” vibe going on. The pictures are essentially 2D raster graphics rendered with 5mm acrylic beads strung on fishing wire. Second, it’s subject matter is Star Trek. And finally it uses the constraints of the medium to its advantage – the semi-transparent beads used to capture an image of Kirk, Spock and McCoy materializing in the Transporter.

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The photo doesn’t do it justice. From afar the shimmering images are stunning and very realistic looking, while close up they turn abstract and all you can see is the process and materials. I’m not sure why the artist decided to use the metal spacers between the beads – perhaps to make it more transparent? Or maybe to make the pixels have a square aspect ratio? The spacers make the vertical distance between “pixels” approximately the same as the horizontal distance.

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I’m not above stealing a fantastic idea like this, and bought a bunch of acrylic faceted beads which I sorted by color with the help of my family. I haven’t gotten around to doing one yet, but hope to soon.

atoms / electrons — No Comments
12
Jun 10

Maker Faire 2010

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What a difference a year makes. A year ago I didn’t have a TechShop membership, didn’t know what Atmel AVR or Arduino meant, didn’t own a soldering iron and had never fired a laser outside of a DVD player. That all changed last year when I attended my first Maker Faire and was overwhelmed by the amount of creativity and technology on display. It was almost too much, as I remember walking around a little dazed not sure what to look at. However, when I think back on that day one particular exhibit does stick in my memory.

It was what appeared to be a home-built Apple ][ computer. It turned out to be BMOW (Big Mess o’ Wires). This was a guy who had built his own 8-bit computer (including a CPU largely of his own design) using wire wrap and some relatively simple components. An impressive project and he was just some random dude showing it off for fun.

Fast forward a year and I was a random dude with a few projects featured on Hack-A-Day and a desire to show them off for fun. I brought two existing projects: TweetWall and the surprisingly popular Apple //t and a new project I did special for Make Faire which was called Memewrestle. The common theme was displaying real-time data from Twitter on dedicated devices, and my exhibit was called Twitter Objects.

IMG_0286Memewrestle was designed to show the relative popularity of two terms on Twitter. My friends at Bing hooked me up with an API that counts all mentions of two terms over the past several hours and the relative popularity is indicated on a servo-controlled dial. They tell me it’s up to date within 10 seconds or so and folks at the booth reported seeing their Tweets update the data in real-time. We compared favorite Mythbuster hosts (Adam won, but it was close in the afternoon) and American Idol finalists (we correctly predicted Lee Dewyze as the winner) on Memewrestle, among other things. The contest for “favorite Black Sabbath vocalist” took a dramatic turn when Ronnie James Dio died earlier in the week, giving him a decisive victory. And if you need me to tell you the outcome of Justin Bieber vs. Lady Gaga you’re just not paying attention.

In addition to the projects I did a little bit of stuff for the booth. I built a nice color-changing LED sign inspired by a design that Macetech.com used last year. I designed a logo and cut it on a CNC vinyl cutter at TechShop, then stuck that to a light-diffuser panel in a wood enclosure I built. The sign is illuminated by RGB LED strips and driven by an Arduino and powered via several  Macetech ShiftBar modules. My software can control each of 6 LED strips to do color patterns and animations.

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The star of the show was the 30-year old Apple //e showing live Tweets. Anyone at the show who mentioned @apple2t on Twitter would see their profile picture and message displayed on the Apple. Lots of folks did so and took pictures of their tweets on display. After the show I replied to each person who mentioned @apple2t and sent them the high-res and low-res versions of their profile picture generated by my software. Here’s a mosaic of some of the folks who stopped by the booth in Apple II graphics.

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It was an exhausting weekend, but a lot of fun. I estimate that a few thousand folks came by the booth and I met a lot of great people. One of the best experiences was meeting people in real life that I’ve come to know and respect over the internet – and this happened countless times. It was also cool to have complete strangers come up and tell me how much they like my blog. Every once in a while someone would look at me in a confused way and ask what I was selling or what the commercial angle was. To each of them I gave the same response. “All of this…” I would state, stretching my arms out and pausing for dramatic effect “…is a vast money-losing operation.” It’s a labor of love and meeting cool like-minded people is one of the fruits of that labor.

The cherry on top was winning an Editor’s Choice award from Make Magazine for my exhibit. It’s hanging in my workshop proudly.

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So will I be back next year? Absolutely, but I probably won’t be exhibiting anything. Next year I’ll be there looking at everyone else’s projects, just like the guy who wandered up to my booth wearing a BMOW T-Shirt. I realized a bit too late that this was Steve Chamberlin – the same guy that inspired me to do something last year was at my booth listening to my spiel. I really wanted to tell him that story but it was mobbed and couldn’t catch his attention. I recently learned he won a blue ribbon last year as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what some random dude does next year.

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