In May I moved into a new office with the great guys of The Future of Everything. The office has really nice big windows and we thought about what we could do with them. I remembered hektor, this super cool 2D drawing machine. What if that thing could draw directly onto the window?
So, here is Der Kritzler (kritzeln is german for scribble).
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Almost a year ago Martin came to me and asked me, if would like to join him on a cool project. His idea was to put a LED POV into a real race car. Of course I wanted!
Every race event attracts a lot of fans. Martin’s idea was to integrate the fans into the race. The race cars should carry fan messages around the track and print them into the night.
The technique used for that is called POV (Persistence of vision). It is somehow related to Light Painting. For that you take a long exposure picture and move the LEDs through it. If the LEDs are switched on and off in the right pattern, it prints a readable message on the picture.
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Soldering is easy. It realy is. If you are still in doubt, head over to mightyohm.com, where you can find a really nice comic on how to solder, done by my good friends Jeff Keyzer and Mitch Altman.
Best of all, it’s totally open source!
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After reading about light stencils at DIY Photography I was sure I had to try that. In short, you use a flash to illuminate a printout while taking a long exposure picture.
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Do you remember, when you first started your X and stared at Xeyes? Aaaah, those were the days.
I wanted to have Xeyes in Processing to have it as an example of some lines of code that could be easily integrated into an interactive demo or the like. So I thought, ok, that’s quite easy, just draw a bunch or ellipses and circles. Turns out that it is not that easy.
Two years ago I posted about how to build a neoprene sleeve for a Macbook. This time it’s a sleeve for a Samsung Galaxy Tab. As last time, my mom did the work, I did the documenting 
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A couple of months ago Martin came up with the idea to build a dustbin, that would take pictures of people using it and then send them to Twitter. We tried some different approaches and finally used an Arduino, a WiFly-shield and a c328 serial camera to build it. It worked really well and was a lot of fun.
What you see there on my desk is the current issue (2011/01) of Weave. Weave is a magazine that covers interactive design and such. We were asked to write an article on “internet of things” and now, there it is. It’s a tutorial on how to use Arduino with twitter and how to take pictures and upload them.
Here is a teaser of the article (in german).
I hope to find some time soon to document the project in a separate post. We’ll see. You can follow @TweetsOfWaste to see any updates of the project and the first couple of pictures.
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End of October, Marcus and I gave a two day workshop on sensors, Internet of Things and Arduino. It was for people who had small to no knowledge about electronics and programming, so not for the average geek. The aim was to show how easy it is to build things that interact with the physical world. It was hosted at the Good School.
First day was training. With small examples on sensors and outputs we saw how easy it is, to collect real world data and act upon them. After that we connected the Arduino with a WiFly-Shield to the interwebs. At the end of the day all had an Arduino running, that did a search on twitter and if someone tweeted your name, an LED light up. Not bad for the first day.
Second day was free tinkering. Everyone could come up with ideas for projects. We gave some guidance of would could be achieved until the end of the day and what not. Then all started on developing their projects. Marcus and I had a lot to do in answering questions and giving hints into the right direction. At the end their was a presentation where all proudly presented their project. And they were really great. All teams came up with something that really worked, none failed. What a success.
That was a fantastic experience, having so many people together, tinkering and having fun. All of them were really engaged and fully committed to their projects. I took a couple of pictures, and guess what, all people you see on these pictures are smiling and enjoying what they are doing.
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Last weekend, Marcus of interactive-matter and I, gave a small introduction into internet of things and ambient devices at the Good School. The idea was to have two devices that show the current volume of two terms on twitter, e.g. love against hate. The demo should show how easy it is to connect the physical world to the internets. Marcus did the software part, so if you are interested in that, visit interactive-matter. I did the hardware part, if you want see that, just read on.
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Here are two brand new boards for faster prototyping. These are especially useful for these one-off projects that need to be more permanent than on a breadboard. And they save time as most of the standard components as reset button or ISP header are already on board. Only the custom part of the project has to be soldered on the proto area. They come in two flavors, one for ATtiny25 and one for ATtiny2313 Atmel microcontrollers.
Even a 3 AA cell battery holder with on/off switch is included in the kit. There also two new how-tos with detailed step-by-step instructions, Tiny25 Proto Board Howto and Tiny2313 Proto Board Howto.
You can grab a full kit at the Tinker Store, if you like.
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