Above is the PowerPoint slideshow that Diego made for our in-class presentation. There is also copious supporting material at the following locations:

• Photos, with lots of chatty comments
  
• Videos, interspersed with kittenage
• Arduino code
• Processing code
  • colors_highlight_new_swatch – this is the color palette module. It reads a text file containing all the colors in the appropriate Krylon spraypaint line and outputs them as a grid of colored squares. The active swatch and rolled-over ones are highlighted with colored borders. It’s glitchy, as you can see if you look in the upper left corner, but basically it works.
  • spraycans – I would like to make my own set of brushes, based on Diego’s, that are all the same style but in different sizes. These would then be mapped to the number of fingers being held up, with more fingers triggering a bigger spray cone. This would make it easier for users to get predictable, slightly repeatable results. Toward that end, I made a spraycan object whose spray cone, label number (for the size), and can color (for the paint) are variable. Epileptics should probably not view this sketch.
  • Main application – The “final” in “final_application_4″ refers to the this being our final project for the semester, not to the code itself actually being final. For, verily, it is not. This is the wrapper into which all the other modules will eventually be rolled. It’s a whole lot of nested if statements and functions. This program doesn’t run unless the glove is plugged in; I should fix that, to make it easier to check code while programming.

I had wanted to make an AfterEffects animation for my CommLab final project, but then I didn’t get around to playing with the program until the eleventh hour. The result is definitely not what I had in mind. (What I wanted to do was more like de Vicq de Cumptich’s Bembo’s Zoo animations.)

I finally managed to be in the same place at the same time as Diego, so we were able to make a work plan, go buy some supplies, and put together our first prototype of what now seems to be The Drawing Glove.

Well, actually, first, we were able to sit there scratching our heads over how to connect a flex sensor. I’ve had one of those things for months and never used it, because I could never figure out how it should be connected. So I looked online and found . . . lots of other glove projects using flex sensors. That’s okay, though—“This one is different—because it’s us.” I also found some inspirational photos of flex sensor connections.

People had warned us that these sensors break easily, and I’d read that they only last for a limited number of bends. I knew there was no way I could solder wires to one these without wrecking the whole damn thing, so I thought that for quick-and-dirty prototyping purposes, maybe I could just hold them together with electrical tape.

Yeah. Meanwhile, Sofia wandered over to ask what we were working on. She, too, was making a glove, and I took the opportunity to ask her how the hell she was attaching her flex sensors to wires. The answer: wire wrap. Okay, that makes sense. She also kindly revealed the location of the specific Radio Shack where she’d managed to find a wire-wrapping tool, but it turned out they had them (albeit somewhat hidden) at the store closest to school. So Diego went out and got us some enamel-coated magnet wire and a wrapping tool.

Man, I am never soldering anything, ever again. Wire wrapping is the way to go.

Diego had attached the flex sensor and LED to his original, flat prototype using Velcro, and we decided to stick with this approach (so to speak) for the glove version. So I borrowed a needle from Thomas and spent a ridiculously long time sewing tiny squares of black Velcro onto a black glove using black thread, in the inky darkness that is the central work area at ITP. The following photo is enhanced for your viewing ease; in reality, I could not at all see what the fuck I was doing:

Finally the wires were all wrapped, the Velcro was all attached, the alligator clips were clipped (yes, the wires we laboriously wrapped were too short; and your point is . . . ?), and we had a thing to test.

Hey! It lights up!

It even stays lit when you put it on! And the flex sensor turns the LED on and off!

As the video shows, we soon ran into some technical difficulties. I ended up tailor-tacking the sensor and all the wires down, so that they’d stop pulling out of place. But it kind of works! Amazing!

Onward. Next, we get to try to attach the remaining four sensors and LEDs. And we’ll probably want to eliminate some of those noisy wires, since flex sensors really don’t like them.

The final video is on YouTube.

I’m working with Dimitri(o)s, Diego, and Jason on the video project du jour, and this week we had to draw storyboards for our piece. The guys wrote a script on Thursday, while I had a prior engagement. Today we split the script up into four chunks, and each of us drew the panels for one section. My first four panels are above. The whole storyboard is in this PDF that Diego made. As a bonus, doing this assignment also got me off the hook for missing a few days of DrawMo!

The gist of the story is that this guy (ML, aka Male Lead) discovers that his headphones allow him to hear other people’s thoughts—but only negative ones.

Next week, we’re somehow going to try to shoot this thing, in the subway. Fortunately, it looks like videotaping in the subway, even with a tripod, is not illegal, as long as you don’t block access or passage. Basically, as long as we don’t act like those film crew assholes who’re always redirecting me around my own fucking office building, we should be fine. Cops often have interesting misconceptions about the laws they’re supposedly enforcing, though, so I’ll try to remember to print out a copy of the rules before we go.

P.S. We used a cleaner version of the storyboard form, which I made because the one Spencer supplied filled me with sorrow.

Get it now! Detailed, full-color documentation of the famed MC Squared midterm project!

MC_Squared(fin).pdf (14.68 MB; sorry, it contains a couple of embedded videos)

We gave our presentation today, the thing mostly worked, and it wasn’t too embarrassing. And, unlike some people in the class, my group actually got two or three hours of precious, golden sleep the night—well, morning—before. (We closed down the floor at about 3:30 a.m., but a few of our classmates relocated to the library or some such place to keep working. Everybody seemed pretty crispy by 9:30 this morning.)

So, . . .

I didn’t have a partner because apparently everybody else was already working with someone. This meant I could work on the video at home. BUT I don’t have a tripod or copy stand at home, I couldn’t find the data cable for either of my cameras, and I didn’t feel like blowing $50 on an iStopMotion license. So I shot each frame by hand, aligned them in Photoshop, tweened more frames in between some of them, and strung them together in both the demo of iStopMotion (which leaves a watermark—hence the slight letterboxing) and iMovie HD. The last chunk of frames are not aligned—it’s amazingly laborious to do so—which is why they wobble all over the place.

In a word, it sucks.

But, hey! I learned so much.

Diego checking out the vintage iPod box I brought in as a visual aid for the shape of our thing:

I’m not sure what else we might have observed that would be truly relevant in the development of a gadget that doesn’t serve any real purpose, but we observed whatever we could think of.

• Diego searched for other cuboid musical instruments and found Murat Konar’s loopqoob.
• It was Filippo, I think, who pointed us to Jon Spencer’s virtuosic theremin demonstration.
• I queued up one of the many, many cat + theremin videos for the guys to watch.

What I think is significant about the cat thing is that it’s proof that, really, anyone can play a theremin. You don’t have to be human, you don’t need opposable thumbs, you don’t have to know anything about electricity or traditional musical instrument interfaces (though there is evidence that animals know more about electromagnetic fields that humans do, in some ways).

Filippo showing the Jon Spencer video:

The Jon Spencer video shows us a similar thing, but also introduces theatricality to the mix. Anyone, even a nonhuman, can play a theremin or thereminic instrument, but if you are a human and you have a sense of whimsy, you can play that instrument in a much greater variety of ways. Spencer shows that you can play a theremin with any part of your body. Probably the only other instrument that can boast such versatility is the drum, but even that is mostly theoretical. Yes, sure, you can strike a drum with your nose, but it’s going to hurt, so most people probably don’t do it. Playing a theremin with your nose is harmless, however. There is no penalty for eccentricity, except that if you flail around too much, you might stray out of the sensors’ range.

The loopqoob is also versatile—you don’t have to have fingers, necessarily, but they certainly help. Ditto for eyes—the markings on the loopqoob help you tell the sides apart, but do they really hint at what revealing each side does? No. Those patterns on the side probably respresent something, but the metaphors are not obvious.

And then, we observed actual, live humans using the IR-sensing thingummy on Diego’s Groovebox. Here’s Diego setting it up:

and here are various people trying to make sense of it.

Mostly, we learned that people like playing with IR sensors. But I think it’d be more interesting to be able to play one of these things with someone else—to introduce some more variety to the mix.

Crank your speakers and click to play

Sorry about the wobbles.

This is my video journal of the Servo lab for PhysComp, filmed for CommLab on a Sanyo Xacti 6MP digital movie camera.

I tried to edit this within the Xacti, but I ended up joining the clips together in the wrong order. It was way too much work to separate them again—it’s just a lousy way to edit—so then I dumped the mess into iMovie HD (an older version, recommended by Bre Pettis in his very fine Getting Started in Video series), recut and rearranged it, and added title frames from Photoshop (too bad they look like crap after compression) and CC-licensed music by the excellent Kristin Hersh. This was my first time using iMovie; I found it reasonably intuitive.

So, basically, it’s just the worst video for a Kristin Hersh song ever. Rock on.