back to geekiness for a moment…
I bought the FinePix W1 camera from a shop in Kumamoto the other day, after seeing and playing with the demo unit it was hard not to buy it..
back to geekiness for a moment…
I bought the FinePix W1 camera from a shop in Kumamoto the other day, after seeing and playing with the demo unit it was hard not to buy it..
I’ve started contacting tattoo places about the QR code tattoo, no responses just yet though. To make the pattern simpler I’ve loaded it up in Inkscape and started blanking out small sections of it whilst having the scanner point at the screen. The majority of the code seems to be redundant, theres a lot of version information there as well that can be cut out too. Hopefully a lot of it can be removed before its tattoo’d to make it easier to get on my accurately.
A while back I bought some Thermochromic paper to experiment with, I saw a clock on a blog that used this in conjunction with nichrome wire to produce a flexible, flat, slow-changing display. The nichrome wire I have is a pain in the arse to work with, its coiled on a spool and retains it curve when cut off for use, making a 7 segment display damn near impossible.
The plan I’ve got is to make a “pre-birthday” card, something that you open 3-4 days before your birthday and over the course of those days an image slowly starts to appear. The obvious design for this is a plant, with each part of the stem revealing slowly until a full grown plant is “grown”. I want to keep it as flat as possible I’m using tin-foil to wire it all:
I’ve pritt-sticked a layer of foil down and then cut the traces with a sharp craft knife, luckily pritt stick is crap and doesnt hold the foil on too well so peeling off the unneeded parts is easy.
The card isnt complete yet, I need to find a way to control it all, I’ve ordered some AVR thingies which are probably stupidly overpowered for this task but hey, theyre a quid each :p As easy as this is to interface with an Arduino its a little oversized for this application :p
After this one I might try to build a simple grid/pixel array like this. Complexity FTW!
The Bluetooth GPS thingy arrived on friday so I started work on the phone-side of the facebook gps tracker app.
Its written in Python using PyS60, oddly no extra modules are needed yet. The app connects to the gps device and attempts to read the data off. If it finds some position information it then pushes it to a PHP app on my webserver, this in turn grabs the map, generates the FBML then stuffs it onto facebook. All in all its working a treat.
1 problem though, the stupid designers of the gps device have put an “auto power off” feature on, if the device doesnt detect a gps signal or BT connection it pwoers off. Thats rather annoying as I dont want my phone keeping a BT connection alive all day (it’ll kill the battery!.I’m hoping that simply tapping the power button will keep it alive, if thats the case then I’ll hack an optoisolator and 555 timer circuit to keep pushing it 
I may even publish the map location to this blog in a sidebar of sorts.
As part of the nabaztag stuff I’ve been looking at a general framework for this sort of thing, something with different ‘plugins’ to output to different devices. As a test I’ve started writing Facebook apps 
So far I’ve managed to write a desktop app that updates my status from a python script.
Another idea I’m working on is automatic facebook updates, for example I can leave bluetooth switched on my phone and have my server pick up when I’m in range. If I am (and wasnt) then set my facebook status to “has just arrived at home”, or even if it detects that I’m on the wordpress admin page have it set my status to “blogging”. I’ve started work on a prioritising system as well, so that some updates dont override others.
Further on from this I’d love to have my GPS coords (taken from the phone) uploaded to facebook every half hour or so. Theres no point at all other than pure geekiness hey, thats what its all about!
The Simon game arrived in the post yesterday, so I spent last night pulling it apart
I’ve cut a windows in the side for the USB port of the arduino and managed to cram it all in the case with no problem. I did manage to cut my finger in the process though 
At the moment its covering the dining room table in bits, I’ve started soldering the ISD side of things to stripboard and cut bits of casing out to fit that in too. Its not there yet but coming along nicely:)
No sign of the lasers yet
So i’ve got a basic version of simon swears running:
So i burned out the laser diode :/ Think I may have shorted the capacitor onto it, dumping 6v straight into it. It still lases but only produces a dim dot with a line through it
Off I go to order 2 new ones AND the driver kits. I aint breaking the next one :p
..its taken me to get the ISD chips talking to an Arduino with SPI.
Firstly I cocked up and switched the MISO and MOSI lines :p my bad.
Secondly I couldnt get it to passthrough sound from its input directly to output (for monitoring levels). Solved that by programming the analogue path registers. This is especially fun as the SPI data on the ISD chips are LSB and I didnt realise.
Finally got it to pass through and (jeeez!) record something, it now seems to playback too. Its a P.I.T.A. to playback though. You have to record the sounds to the chip then find out the start and end addresses in memory that contain the data. You then push that to the device to have it play. Ugh.
Next task is to integrate this with the Simon game I’ve written and try to get it off the protoboard and onto something more permanent.
Still waiting for the actual Simon game though
Well my second arduino has arrived, turns out its not the one I ordered from the U.S. (in fact, I have no idea why this one has arrived :p ). I’ve been fascinated by laser projectors for ages after seeing one being used on the dome at epcot when I was a kid.
Just recently I came across this: Laserline, its an audio controlled laser scanner application. You attach mirrors to two speakers (one for x-axis and one for y) and shine a laser at it.
I have to build this!! I’ve ordered a Sony 16x diode for the laser part, its capable of burning and cutting dark paper/plastic, so should have some decent range to it :p
My aim is to write rude words on clouds :p
And great, two workmen have just arrived outside and are setting up over the comms box in the floor. Guess this is bye-bye-broadband :p
The first steps in getting sound output on my arduino are done, I’ve succesfully hooked up the ISD1700 chips with all the analogue gubbins that it needs and made it record from my laptops line-out. Had a little fun with this, the chip requires a resistor to set the sample rate. For what I’m doing it needs to be about 56K – the only one I could find was about 20 years old and covered in crud :/ Funnily it works but seems to vary in resistance, giving the sounds a great “fucked up vinyl” quality :d Might experiment with this and do some circuit bending style things with the other 4 I have
As of 9:45 this evening, the memory on the first chip is filled with eels
The next stage is to control it with the SPI bus from the arduino, shouldnt be too bad
Oh yeah, I’ve also gone on a domain registering bender – I now own http://upthear.se Thanks to Domain Hacks for that
Also ordered myself a 16x DVD burner laser module, plan to do some computer controlled laser cutting with it (or just piss cats off from miles away)