I found this while looking for a teardown of a Wii Nunchuck remote since they’re cheap and include a 3 axis accelerometer. I mentioned an interface board the other day, but the responsiveness of the interface in this video grabbed my attention. If you like it, you should check out this [via] Nunchuck Arduino RF controlled robot. You can find details on that bot here. The accelerometer itself only runs about $10, but it’s a pretty small SMD part.

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Originally
from Hack a Day

by Will O’Brien

reBlogged

on Apr 6, 2008, 11:08PM

Originally by Will O’Brien from Hack a Day on April 6, 2008, 7:08pm

Originally
from polygonal labs

by Michael

reBlogged

on Mar 17, 2008, 2:13PM

Originally by Michael from polygonal labs on March 17, 2008, 10:13am

Originally
from WE THE ROBOTS

by Chris H

reBlogged

on Mar 31, 2008, 7:00AM

Originally by Chris H from WE THE ROBOTS on March 31, 2008, 3:00am

A couple weeks ago, Mosso changed some stuff and got my buddy Derek and I got to talking about hosting options if Mosso doesn’t pan out. I decided that since I have this perverse hobby, I should document my journey.

So here is my list of hosting providers I recommend and enjoy!

Mosso: This is currently my friends blog and generic client hosting favorite. It is easy to use, has amazing service and hilarious growing pains. I have been using them for about a year – and have been VERY happy with pretty much everything. They currently have some crazy billing issues to work out – but when they figure that out, I would certainly recommend using them. One thing to keep in mind: if you have clients, you can’t do any better than Mosso – they can white label EVERYTHING (including phone support). It is awesome.

MediaTemple: These guys are cool. Seriously. I didn’t really like MediaTemple until I hung out with the dudes. They are doing cool stuff with virtualization and easy scaling. For instance, you could get one of their horribly named (dv) servers for around 50 bucks a month and then if you ever have a problem with the resources or “scaling”” abilities with the virtualized server, you can just go ahead and “seamlessly” upgrade to a dedicated box. This is because their dedicated boxes are just virtualized instances as well as the (dv) servers. So upgrading the box is as simple as copying your server image from the shared box to the dedicated box. You don’t have to change IPs, copy your content or really any of the stupid shit that makes scaling annoying. Now this is of course in theory (and told to me while i was drunk). I have never actually don’t this. BUT – it seems like it should and would work. (if you can shed some light on this – let me know).

FDCservers: FDC servers is interesting. I can’t imagine that they are solid or have good support in times of need. Or that their servers aren’t made from ants and cheese. But seriously. They are cheap, support is good and they are FAST. They have some of the cheapest, fastest servers i have ever seen. Its out of control (and fast and cheap (what a good documentary)). I don’t hesitate to use them whenever I need a fast, cheap server with a FAT pipe. But – I am worried that someday their servers will turn to dust without a warning. But until them – they are my secret dedicated server host.

Webfaction: Webfaction is my new best friend. Seriously. If I wasn’t already married to an beautiful, awesome woman, I would marry webfaction. They have blown my mind. You are able to use ANY web technology you want to use. They have decent resource allotments and they are rather inexpensive. Especially considering they are expecting you to use long running processes like Ruby or Python frameworks or apps. Pretty sweet. If you want a host that allows you to host a wordpress blog, experiment with web.py, run a rails app and allow you to rock out with django – all under the same domain root – webfaction is your host. The secret is that its all proxied. So when you set up a rails app, it tells you the port number to run that app on. Then it maps that port number on the localhost of the box to /railsapp on the public IP. I currently host my blog and homepage at webfaction. I trust them more than any of these others (I am furiously knocking on wood you read this).

Rackspace: Rackspace is obviously not your general needs host. It is probably the best host you can get. But don’t just grab a Rackspace server and think your good. You gotta get the intensive support. Its like having a concierge service for your hosting. Its incredible. If you are a small organization, and don’t want to have to worry about all the nonsense that goes with managing servers, infrastructures, data centers – then give Rackspace a call. They have really helped us (threadless) grow and scale. They are solid.

These are the hosts I use on a daily basis. All of them i recommend. Obviously you wouldn’t use Rackspace to host your not often read blog, and you wouldn’t use webfaction to host your $100MM social network. However, all of these options have one thing in common. They all have decent support and they all seem to LOVE what they are doing. I can’t deal with vendors who offer products that they themselves wouldn’t use. You can’t trust those guys. You can trust all these guys (except FDC – with their prices, they have to be doing something tricky. heh. ).

Originally
from Harper Reed: Tech, Phones, Yo-yoing and Death Metal

by Harper

reBlogged

on Mar 2, 2008, 7:32AM

Originally by Harper from Harper Reed: Tech, Phones, Yo-yoing and Death Metal on March 2, 2008, 2:32am

–TechnoDots from Joa Ebert.

I’m currently working on developing some interactive art tools for a gallery. It’s a project that we’re revisiting after it was dropped a few years ago, all the work we have from back then is in Director, and a little bit janky. So it’s all getting re-done in tasty AS3. I’ve managed to bodge together a simple smudge tool for the time being (needs cleaning up). And I am going through some other tools we have trying to prettify them. While looking for ways to do this I found that the AIF Toolkit from Adobe was released at the beginning of October, how I missed that I don’t know! So I’ve been having a little play around with that, and really wishing that this was available now-NOW-now! as it would be really nice to incorporate some of this in editing tool I’m working on. Alas I will have to wait for Astro, and another project to come along that gives me the opportunity to play around with Hydra.

Smudgeificate!!

Opening Night 9th October - Invite Only. Featuring Artists…. Ben Frost, Hydro74, Bemodern, Mudwig, Si Scott, Airside, Pure Evil, Keith Watts, KozynDan, Mr Ian Wright, Pandayoghurt, Sean Alexander, Slinkachu, John Cossey….

Originals and very limited editions prints will be available. – Also feature magic by Dynamo on the opening night!

Cosh Gallery 69 Berwick St, W1F 8SZ. (Just off Oxford Street).

I went along to this last night, rather enjoyable! Dynamo’s magic tricks were impressive, and when he got his rabbits in on the act it was… the stuff of magic! There was a nice range of artwork on show, a couple of really nice lithographs from Kozyndan (bunnyfish!), more wonderful flourishes from Si Scott, an interesting take on Mickey Mouse with bunnies wetting themselves, and some really great pieces from Mr. Bambi (my favorite that evening). I took a few photos of what I liked the most, if you get the chance to go along to this I’d recommend it. Looking forward to more great exhibitions at the Cosh Gallery!

Kevin and Alex finally made it over to London, along with the guys from the ‘Totally Rad Show’, and Gary Vaynerchuk from tv.WineLibrary.com

Along with the usual beers and mac bashing, there were plenty of fuckups (running out of tape *again*? oops!), heckling, and even a marriage proposal for Alex. No really, it wasn’t even a guy! Though she had to settle for just a hug, cue jealously from all the hardcore digg fans in the room.

It was really great to see these guys in person finally, much funnier than I am used to from the podcast although they seemed alot more sober! Maybe that’s just because we were so far back behind the seething mass of adoring fans. Here’s to hoping they make it back sometime soon for another show!

Cheers Kevin and Alex! *extreme sip*

It was a good evening with a range of different topics discussed. I particularly enjoyed seeing Crispin’s development and prototyping process of the Tengu, taking something from a simple idea and developing it into a real live.. thing! This linked in nicely for me with Massimo’s talk on the development and uses of Arduino and some of the new extendable modules which are out now / soon. My ears pricked up when he mentioned their new project to enable extreme rapid prototyping, requiring very little expertise on the developers side. No more breadboard hell is how he described it, exciting! I look forward to trying it out on some projects when it is finished.

Unfortunately I missed part of Karsten’s talk about the interactive tables made for the London College of Fashion graduate show. Luckily I managed to get a chance to try them out first hand and have a chat about them during London Design Week at Moving Brands, where they had a rather nice get together and natter about the state of new media.

Dee’s talk on the ‘Science of..’ exhibitions was very in depth, alot of text up on screen… I’m more of a visual person so I was worried I was going to start drifting off, but it actually proved very interesting to learn more about it. Having had chance to read through some of the briefs first hand is no doubt why I found the introduction rather slow, but it was really good to get a good overview of the entire process of a science of exhibition, and getting a picture of just how many people are involved (alot more than I realised). AllofUs even got a mention, so yey for… AllofUs!

Rory’s talk was the final one of the evening, explaining how live|work helped to design and organise better use experiences for the Baltic Gallery in Newcastle, again a talk that I was not excited about at first but it was really nice to see the way they empowered the staff of the Baltic, and took on their ideas and experiences.

Overall a very good evening, I would recommend checking it out next time this is on. Now that they are sponsored by tinker.it and can host the evening for free (as long as you signup in time) this is definitely an event to attend if you are at all interested in ‘new media’!

Got My project (mostly) up and running. There are a few problems with it still at the moment; performing a search with more than one word (cannot currently handle spaces, oops!), although the point was to only allow searches for single words no error is returned, just blank results. I also didn’t manage to develop the generative art mixer as far as I was hoping, due to both time and technical limitations. I had hoped to have a reactive cloud of images on the top layer, but due to everything else that is taking place it is not possible to achieve this at an acceptable framerate without switching over to actionscript 3. Despite it not being absolutely everything I had initially hoped for I think it turned out quite well, and is receiving a fair amount of traffic now it is finally up and running!

Once I’ve got this part sorted the rest of the coding should be done by the weekend, so I’ve started on the packaging design now so it will be ready in time! Need to get to work on the video as well.

I’m going to try out laser etching on the CD-face, but if that doesn’t work out then I’ll just use a label.

– UPDATE –

Got the best birthday present ever from Leo, a working project! Spent a while in uni faffing with the PHP and now it will take the search term, grab tags from the first X number of results and order them by most frequently occurring, and then submit these to flickr to get corresponding photos. Huzzah. Leo is awesome, thankyou Leo!!

I’ve also very nearly finished the gallery half of the project. At the moment it’s loading photos in from a local xml file, rather than flickr, till I get the positioning and load order perfect. Plus I’m now having more server problems, the new server keeps returning

“The requested URL /cgi-bin/php4.cgi/aot/flickr/index.php was not found on this server.”

when I’ve just clicked on a direct link to it from directory listing

I’m also getting a problem I though I had already fixed again. When the gallery loads in photos from flickr it throws up two of the same photo at a time, then as more get loaded in all the duplicate photos are replaced by the correct search results. I think my project is jinxed.

– UPDATE –

Seems that it just fixed itself, scary stuff. I’m going to try switching the way I grab the information from flickr from scraping the page to using simplexml. Should be a little more stable converting the XML to a nested object list or a nested key/value array and going from there. Unfortunately the only way I can grab the data from delicious is by scraping the page, I’ll look for a cleaner way to do this than I currently have but I dont hold out much hope.

The interface is now finished, take a gander here. Clicking on things wont do anything yet, but you can get a sneak peak of the generative art and gallery, which are both running alot smoother now. The generative art especially is much improved, now running at a decent framerate (I hope!). Let me know if anything is broken for you so I can fix it!

It is possible that it could just stop working on the new servers, and I don’t want to have to relocate the files every few months to keep it up and running. I’m now waiting for a response from tech support, hopefully they can help me out. If not then I might just have to bug everyone for some server space to make sure I have plenty of mirrors setup.

Work on the rest of the project is going well, the generative art mixer is all but finished. Got a few tweaks and small changes to make, but apart from that all I have to do is pretty it up and debug. But if I don’t get these php troubles sorted… bye bye project!

- UPDATE -

Wow, super quick response from tech support. Looks like I might be using incompatible php; according to tech support my server is now using version 4.4.6, built on Apr 2 2007, but according to phpinfo( ) im still running 4.4.4, built on Feb 22. The other servers I’m using all use 4.4.4, so if it has changed to 4.4.6 then that sounds like the problem, also roughly the time my project stopped working. I’ll need to either fix my code, or if that isn’t possible, beg for them to roll back my php to the previous version.

The first two images here show the main screen, from which the user can search using either the gallery or generative art module.

This image shows the gallery, which displays the results from the users search. Related tags are displayed at the top, which allows the user to explore all the related tags and associated weirdness.

This image shows the generative art module, with controls for user interaction. The generative art piece is made up from three layers, each with sliders to control several aspects of each.

The background has a photo from the search results, heavily blurred, to provide a base of colour for the rest of the piece. Traces are then drawn upon this, with the user specified colour burning into the colours from the photo.

The second layer is a set of semi-random shapes. There is a large library of assets, the rotation, size, colour, and placement is then dictated according to user input and chance.

The final layer uses the same library of assets as a mask for five photos, which move in a semi-random pattern, following the cursors movement.

I haven’t done any work on my project in a few weeks now, so I was sure that it wasn’t me messing up the code somewhere. Just to check I looked through everything. Nothing out of the ordinary, apart from the lack of results from flickr. Getting a bit worried now.

I check to make sure flickr haven’t updated their API, and that I’m not blocked. All is good, I change to a new API-key just in case, despite being nowhere near the max query p/s limit. No change, and I’m panicking. I pull the search out from the php and put it directly into the browser, and wouldn’t you know it, all is ‘gravy’! So the php is messing something up… ok but that’s been working fine for over a month, why break now?! It’s broken, I have no idea how or when, and so I don’t have a clue in the slightest how to go about fixing it. I feel dizzy and faint, my vision blurring, and I pass out on the floor.

I awake several hours later in a daze, and email Leo.

–Update–

Turns out all the other applications of flash/xml/flickr I have dotted around my site have also died. Haven’t been able to find anything about it blogged or on news sites. Looks like I’ll have to email flickr tech support.

Some artistic reference for the genart. I hope to have the photo clouds masked out in semi-random shapes, sizes and rotations. Other elements of simple block colour on a lower layer to interact with the generated lines. Altogether combining in a way not dissimilar to this.

But alot less like a rainbow tree.

Had a bit of trouble keeping the FPS above 8, but now holds at around 25fps on my laptop. Hope it runs as well on the older macs. Need to spend some more time speeding it up so it runs at 30ish.

The vectors are wiped from the canvas and copied to a bitmap to try speed it up a bit, allows fancy blending as well. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the photo cloud working just as well.

The lines are coloured according what colour is beneath them, so it should work well with a background image (pulled from flickr and blurred so is just blobs of colour). Can set a variable which will allow the user to choose a range of what colours are used in the lines.

“Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is the difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.” (Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation)

My goal is not to recreate the data I am investigating, but instead to abstract it to a point where it becomes a form of representation, with less emphasis and importance placed on the actual content itself and focussing on creating a more powerful visualisation. The “charm of the real” is the artistic interest generated.

My new thinking on the matter is this; pass the query into the php and let it scrape delicious, pass this straight to flickr, grab the results and parse out the XML. This can then go straight into flash. Simple as, fingers crossed!