acheiving transhumanism one step at a time

I have taken an internet vacation as you may have noticed…

I’ve decided to start a new weblog — you can find it at weblog.jos.ph

I’ll try to copy over all of these old posts into the new blog, but that might take a while as my time is not so abundant.

This will most likely be my final post on this blog. Thanksssss!

quick video of a potentiometer controlling a servo motor over the interwebs.

arduino -> processing -> PHP [serverside] -> .txt file [serverside] and all the way back on the other computer.

i’ll put up code when it’s all ready to go. as it is, this is ready to go both ways, but for clarity i just filmed it going one way.

these two computers could be thousands of miles apart, just need to be online.

I actually made this back in February (you can see the date etched next to my initials on the board), and never got around to posting about it.   It’s a super simple breakout footprint for a USB mini type-B port.  I wanted to make a really simple way to power my breadboard, and since my computer is usually on my work table, this seemed like a great idea.  I made about 60 of these tiny boards which measure about 2cm x 3cm and hope to sell them as a really cheap, tiny kit one day.

Other than the board itself, the only components necessary are a USB mini type-B port, a 22uF SMT capacitor, and two header pins, which can plug directly into the power rails of your breadboard.  My friend Jen asked me to help her put together a glowing LED circuit inside some ceramic pottery, and part of the concept was that the organic piece would need to plugged into to your computer to ‘live’.  Here are some images of the Arduino Pro Mini powered by my breakout board.

I am honored to have been invited to exhibit my Hoodie at an Arduino restrospective show happening at NYC Resistor this Saturday.

Check out event info here: www.nycresistor.com/2010/03/21/art-design-and-the-arduino-a-lineage/

This was a project I made in June 2009 in Beijing, China. The facemask had green, yellow, and red LEDs that would indicate safe, medium, and dangerous levels of proximity. The project was inspired by the crowded streets of Beijing, and how physical walking down the street could be. The lights would color your face depending on how close something or someone might be to you, emphasizing personal space and public interaction.

I have finally completed my latest : the ” EKG-controlled Game of Life Hoodie “. That’s a wordy title if there ever was one.

The concept here is a wearable version of Conway’s Game of Life, that is controlled by the current state of your life.  Essentially, a wearable extension of your heart, externalized in the form of Conway’s Life. A custom circuit includes an infrared EKG monitor that resets the Game each time a heartbeat is detected. Heartbeat data is analyzed by a hackduino which resets an ATMega48 chip, part of Adafruit’s kit controlling Life, which is embedded in the chest of a hoodie.  Conductive thread is used to connect the 16 LED matrix to the circuit board which is kept in a pocket towards the bottom of the hoodie.

If you are checking this out and are unfamiliar with John Conway’s Game of Life, please read about it, as it is a seminal piece of work, in my opinion one of the most important intersections of art and science.  For the LED matrix playing Life, I used Adafruit’s kit, which is brilliantly designed – able to be daisy chained for larger boards. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) I only had one kit to work with, which mean a 4×4, 16 LED matrix. I decided to use red LEDs, as they represent life, blood, and the heart much more to me than green. Also makes this an even better Valentine’s Day gift   I decided that since I was embedding this into a hoodie, I would not need her PCB, which is bulky.  I designed my own breakout for her chip, which you can see in the circuit towards the end of the post.

I used conductive thread to connect each LED from the chest of the hoodie to the pocket holding the circuit and battery, which is lined with an anti-static bag, inside the wearer’s left hip area. The LED embedding technique was picked up from Becky Stern, and worked out quite well. It was, however, a challenging amount of sewing for a novice such as myself, however I accepted the challenge.  I would say it came out functionally ‘great’ and aesthetically ‘ok’.

Check out the flickr set that documents the entire build process.

For detecting heartbeats, I recreated a circuit originally saw on Make, and then through further research found Meng Li’s project, and finally this schematic – many thanks to Justin Downs for posting his work. The technology here is very simple – an infrared LED (emitter) and detector pair can “see” through your finger: each time blood is pulsed through (= a heartbeat) there is a spike in the amount of light detected.  A LOT of fidgeting and troubleshooting went down in building this circuit, and the result in the video only looks so nice because of a lot of smoothing and averaging done in the code.

Here’s a breakdown of the final circuit I designed to run the hoodie:

It most definitely overkill to be using 2 28-pin ATMega chips for a job that could most definitely be done by one. In Adafruit’s glorious open-sourcery, all code is even posted for their Game! Unfortunately, I do not yet own an AVR programmer and their chip is not bootloaded or supported by the Arduino IDE (the code is all in C). Soon enough I will get my hands on a programmer and if a second version of this arises, I will most certainly use just one chip.

This project would not have happened without Ira Goldberg and Becky Stern.

my first instructable was received warmly and got featured on instructables.com!

Joel Murphy asked me to make this for the advanced physical computing class — I had to figure this process out while designing the SVS system in my thesis.

Custom PCB Prototyping using a Laser Cutter – More DIY How To Projects

I have started to (FINALLY) upload images from the pluto festival where I exhibited my spatialized umbrella project, in Opwijk, Belgium October 1 -4, 2009.

ok nerdzors, look out. Ira told me about a project that she made that took an analog input from processing and posted it to php (and then possibly a database, not sure). i wanted to try it out for myself, so i did some searching, and of course the processing guru Daniel Shiffman had a nice tutorial on at least getting to a php script.

the php script writes to a text file that you are calling from processing. The php script i am using in this first draft is the same as Shiffmans here. once you have that up and running with all the correct permissions set on the file (read+write), you can fire up processing.

I modified his example file so that the sketch loops and constantly checks the script (+ text file) online, and updates the sketch accordingly. I inadvertantly created a collaborative drawing tool. Potentially, an infinite number of computers/machines could connect to this file that are running this processing sketch, so jessica, nick and i had a collaborative drawing session at 2 in the am.

Because you are just calling to a script that’s online, you can actually view the script at any time in a browser, and watch the coordinates get written as you create and erase them.  it would be here: jmsaavedra.com/projects/processingToPHP/loadstrings.php?type=load

• Here is my modified Processing sketch.

Here are some images of our late night drawing session — in the background you can see firefox showing all the coordinates that make up the drawing:

this started out as “OOPS”.. then became “BOOBS”… and then became this. Actually I think Jess did the whole thing ourself. But Nick and I watched.

next up, I will hook up the Arduino to Processing and turn LEDs on and off from around the world.