Video: Gyro at Campus Party

In: Gyro powerball game

20 Aug 2009


Video I shot during the Campus Party in Valencia

Liquid tester

In: arduino|processing

15 Aug 2009

At the ‘Campus Party‘ in Valencia I gave an Arduino introduction workshop, and there were some very good results.

Juan Ferrer and Jorge Cases built a liquid tester, with only two wires and a resistor, which can measure the resistance of a liquid. Because every liquid has a different resistance you can separate different drinks like water or orange juice. With some Processing code you can do something nice with those values.

How to make your own liquid tester:
You need an Arduino, some wires and a 10K resistor.
Upload the standardFirmata to the Arduino, read this for more info.
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Gyro at Campus Party ’09 Valencia

In: Gyro powerball game

12 Aug 2009

Sorry for posting this a bit late, but it was a very busy week.
I was invited at Campus Party ’09 in Valencia to show my Powerball game Gyro.

Campus party is the biggest technology event in the world, it is sort of an oversized LAN-party with more than 6000 geeks. Besides sitting in front of your computer and playing games you can also attend some workshops and listen to various speakers. The Campus Party was held in one of the beautiful buildings from ‘Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias ‘ (city of arts and sciences).

The part of Campus Party where the interactive installations were shown was the ‘Campus Futuro‘ section, there were some other cool interactive projects like the Wiispray, Move and some robots. The entry was free to this section so a lot of people entered.

The building was open from 10:00 till 21:00 seven days a week. It was a good test case to see how Gyro worked under these ‘extreme’ conditions. Although it still is a prototype, it worked quite well and was easy to fix the problems which occurred.
It was a great week and I’am full of ideas and improvements for the next version of Gyro.

3D printing

In: Gyro powerball game|prototyping

28 Jun 2009

3D printing is what a lot of people call ‘the next big thing’. A 3D printer is a machine that prints small layers of plastics on top of each other, by doing this you can create almost every object that you can model in a 3D modeling program.

What is it used for
Most people are using 3D printing for fun or for prototyping. You are able to make almost every object that you can think of. It’s even possible to make objects which are not produce-able with ordinary production methods like shapes inside a bigger shape.

Gyro project
For my Gyro project I used a 3D printer for a plastic part that you can click on top of a Powerball. This part hold the sensor which measures the speed.


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Who’s at the office Twitter script

In: physical computing|processing

24 May 2009

whoisattheoffice

Use this script if you always wanted to now at which time your colleagues enter and leave the office.

What does it do?

It will scan the local network every minute for predefined computernames. If this returns a true than the computer is switched on and the colleague is probably at the office and it will send ‘John Doe has entered the office’ to a Twitter page.

How can I use it

Currently the script is only tested on Mac OS, it shouldn’t be so hard to convert it to a script that is working under Windows, ‘nmblookup’ should be replaced with ‘ping’. Please leave a comment at this page if you have this script working in Windows.

Source files:

» Download Processing code + PHP source files

The Coffee machine on Twitter

In: arduino|physical computing|processing

17 May 2009

coffeemachine

After @BarackObama, @BritneySpears and @oprah it is now time for the coffeemachine to get on Twitter and add some meaning full words.

What does it do?

It will tweet “the coffee machine says: I’m making coffee” if you turn on the coffeemachine, if you switch it off it will tweet “the coffee machine says: someone switched me off”.

How does it work?

This is an overview of the hardware/software/services I used:
Sensor > Arduino > Processing > PHP > Twitter

A LDR (light dependent resistor) is glued on the on/off led of the coffeemachine. When the coffeemachine is switched on the led turns on, the ldr detects this light. This LDR is connected to an Arduino microcontroller, Processing reads the value from the Arduino using Firmata and Processing sends this to a php file which will send it to Twitter.

How to build your own?

Although it looks a bit overwhelming it is very easy to build your own tweeting ‘whatever’ thing, All hardware, software and scripts I used to build this are opensource. I just hacked everything together.
You will need the following:

Source files:

» Download Processing code + PHP source files

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Hot100 – Picnic08

In: Gyro powerball game

27 Sep 2008

The Hot100 are the most talented, newly introduced, most passionated and promising up-and-coming creative media talent.
According to the: Virtueel Platform

During Picnic’08 there was a special day for all the ‘hot’ people.
I presented my Gyro project, and tried to give a practical demo within 3 minutes.

picnic08-hot100-gyro

Golden dot awards – 2008

In: Gyro powerball game

11 Jun 2008

The Golden Dot is a yearly showcase and award ceremony for excellent student projects from the Institute for Interactive Media at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam.
This year, the Golden Dot will take place at Hotel Arena in Amsterdam, on 10 June 2008. In the afternoon, fourteen projects will be pitched before an official jury. That evening, the award ceremony will take place, hosted by Dennis Weening, Mtv Europe.
from: networkcultures.org

Although there was not much competition in the graduation year, the Gyro project has won a ‘Golden Dot’ in the category ‘graduation project’.
I think the Gyro project was a nice and fun project to present and it was certainly something different than ‘a website’. It has struck me that there where quite a lot of presentations which were almost the same.

goldendot-gyro-ericholm

Arduino Unplugged Workshop at Mediamatic

In: arduino|physical computing

20 Mar 2007

A bit late with posting this. Last week I was at the ‘Arduino Unplugged Workshop’ hosted by Mediamatic. Beside a general introduction to the (normal) Arduino NG the workshop focussed also on the new Bluetooth Arduino. Alltough the Bluetooth part isn’t documented very well at the moment, it definitely has a lot of possibilities.
I made a small report and some pictures.

participants

massimo_ubi

lcd_display

Arduino Introduction presentation

In: Gyro powerball game|arduino

8 Feb 2007

I just had my first presentation at the Medialab.
It was just a introduction to Arduino itself and a small word about physical computing in general.

Presentation files: Arduino Introduction (pdf, 0,4 MB)

I also showed a demo of my pong with the Arduino and an accelerometer,
not really a replacement for the wii controller, but it’s a start ;-)

pong accelerometer

For the geeks:
I used a 2-axis digital accelerometer called “adxl202 JQC” from Analog Device. For reading the sensor I slighty modified the standard “accelerometer_memsic2125″ code.

For communicating between the Arduino and flash I used the SerialServer from Dan O’Sullivan. It’s not really simple to setup but once its working it works great.

for more information about Arduino check the ‘official’ Arduino site with a lot of tutorials and examples, and a very usefull forum.

About this blog

The webblog of Eric Holm, designer at Kimogo in Amsterdam. interactive media projects, Flash games and interactive installations.

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