Just My Imagination

My bike got stolen on the first day of school.

Grrrrr!

I guess it balances in the end, I've gotten some new and exciting back to school stuff recently.

Like this! New bag that fits in my bike basket (ok ok irony) so I don't have to carry a heavy backpack. I love it and I even got to pick the fabric, hooray for Etsy (a site for people to sell their own crafts and crafty materials, very worth checking out). Yay for places to buy creative, beautiful, unique things that help people make a living rather than manufactured, chemical-coated, sweatshop-producted crap. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything. :) I don't really understand the appeal of designer clothes/accessories and so forth when (if you're not inclined to make your own) it's possible and even more affordable to customize your own like this.

After a few mishaps in which I discover:

1. Always order spare breakout boards
2. Despite being ROHS-compliant, lead-free solder is a pain
3. I am not very good at soldering

...my RFID board works. Reader and breakout from Sparkfun, cute little tags (sticky black dot on yellow backing in image) from Trossen Robotics, instructions mostly from here.

Yeah my wire color conventions suck, I only had non-stranded wire in yellow and the other stuff turns out to be hard to use in breadboards.

It's still nifty! The LED flashes as long as it's reading a tag. Honestly this is a useless post as I haven't done anything interesting with it yet, but it still feels like magic when something works at all. More soon.

Doodle messaging!

(Sent from phone)

Placeholder for an idea I was playing with today (pics when I actually do it).

I disassembled my Wacom Bamboo today and broke the touch-sensitive scroll button. Woops. Being me, had I known I still would have done it (maybe more carefully). I discovered the panel inside is a decent amount smaller and thinner than the protective case (6.5" by 7 5/8"). In other words, it could be made more portable for taking to school...as well as camouflaged. The plan is to put it inside a composition book.

The other "hack" (hehe) is coming in the mail (who would have thought you couldn't buy these in stores anymore?) Remember those "magic slate" drawing tablets for kids? They're made of a tinted plastic sheet over a sheet of black plastic/wax, you write with a plastic stylus, and you lift the plastic sheet to clear the screen... Well, combine that idea with the lack of direct feedback you get from a drawing tablet (drawing on a pad while looking at the screen is hard to get used to!). They sell Wacom pens that draw in ink too but they're kind of expensive. I made a prototype drawing pad (had to order the magic slate online, so while I'm waiting on a proper one) from a sheet of colored (for candle-decorating) wax and some translucent fabric. I used it with Inkwell (Apple's handwriting-recognition technology) and to insert little doodles into my notes, and it works awesome. Yay!

Frick, this is cute.

It's a BlinkM, from here. For reference, that coin cell battery is about the size of a quarter.

The almost unnecessarily adorable breadboards are from Sparkfun.

It's not quite bright enough to illuminate the Fluff Thing. I may need a Fluff Thing 2.0 in a lighter color.

Man, no wonder I never get anything done...back to the point. I've ordered a bunch of interesting electronic bits and pieces to teach myself how it all works and work on my research project. I'm planning on documenting the learning process for mine and others' reference and/or amusement.

The setup is already incredibly well-documented and took me about 10 minutes to get working. High level overview: It's a "smart LED" that can light up in programmed sequences of colors and make it so you don't have to use up all your controller's resources on pretty LEDs. You upload the provided "communicator code" to an Arduino development board, then plug the BlinkM directly into the Arduino and connect it to your computer. This will then allow the BlinkM sequencer program to upload little color sequences to the BlinkM. It can then replay them by itself (like the pictures above). You can also use the BlinkM libraries to include color commands in Arduino sketches.

My favorite thing I brought back from a conference last year was this little plastic "ice cube" that lit up in sequences of colors. It was beautiful and rather soothing, it just fit in my hand and glowed softly. This is even better, you can make the sequences yourself. It would be a fun intro to electronics project. I'd love to incorporate it into a piece of jewelery.

It's also going to be a good prototyping tool for remotely-connected devices. My first goal once I get the network-connection bits and pieces is to be able to change the color from a web page, and then from another electronic object.

Sorry about the weird spacing, this template is pretty but kind of annoying that way. I may change it soon.
EDIT: Changed.

Camera battery charged long enough to get some pics off.
The new iPhoto is pretty nice! I'm not sure what version, the latest Leopard update as of today. It gave me a nice photo preview even before I had them off my camera, and was super speedy at uploading them.

Made this about a month ago. Now that it's been safely handed over to its recipient I can post it without ruining the surprise.




The sock is made of stretchy conductive fabric. When you place it over the sockless foot it closes a circuit located inside the guitar and the little character starts jamming to "Born to be Wild" (salvaged from a musical greeting card). I wanted to put in a little vibrating motor so it would really rock out but decided not to push my electronics luck this time.

I decided to make some Zip Flops yesterday:


25-cent zippers from a surplus fabric store + Target flip flops + duct tape.

I've been messing around with camera settings/lighting to try and get better project shots. Here's another attempt at the previously posted Merbie, I think it shows the texture a bit better. Any tips for further improvement would be appreciated.



I should get some better pictures of this little guy but I wanted to show him off:



There are magnets on his feet so he can climb fridges (presumably to get to the honey nut cheerios stored on top).

This book is wonderful, I used her template and lots of super useful tips.

Well, cluster challenge application submitted. Exciting! Lots of silly top secret-ness but I'll post more when I can.

Let's see what's on my camera.

Unless its battery is dead. Darn, more in a bit.

My ooh-crap-need-to-not-spend-money bit of the summer having reasonably passed, I'm off to order electronics for my year research project. I might or might not have posted about that already. Basically it's about creating remote communication interfaces for children and play rather than businesses, adults, and work. Googling my original title ("Tangible Interfaces for Remote Communication") of course (because they seem to do everything there) came up with an MIT project which is one of very few I've found that addresses this idea (please tell me if you know of another!). They don't seem to have actually implemented it in hardware, and that's definitely an important component of my project. I have a couple ideas right now (distributed dollhouses and shared shadows), I think I'll try prototyping both and see what comes out.