i need more money

I created the image above to imagine what the photographs might look like. So this past weekend was not the most ideal flying conditions but I manage to get some user testing. New York City may not be the most ideal city either. Each park has specific kite-flying restrictions and since it is earlier spring, the Great Lawn in Central Park is not open to the public. Another problem I have run into this weekend is that many parks close at dusk.

On Saturday night (April 19th), Sinan and I arrived to the Great Lawn in Central Park. Even with a warning that Turtle Pond was close, we still made an attempt to get the kite off the ground. Here is Sinan planning to make another run to get the kite off the ground. Unfortunately there was not enough wind to get the kite up.

Here are some of the test flights example:

On Monday evening (April 21st) I decided to try D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge) right by the river in the hopes to get enough wind for flight. Unfortunately we had to get our flights done before dusk because the park rangers were pretty strict in the closing time of the park. This meant their was too much light in the sky to take decent long exposure photographs.

I spent the greater part of the today working on getting the Xbees talking to each other. I couldn’t have done it without the help of Ben Chao and Tom Jenkins. Thanks a million for getting me jump started. I am also using Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk and Rob Faludi’s tutorial as references. I was able to wire up an xbee to be configured in Terminal using Screen.

1. In Terminal type this to find USB connection: ls /dev/tty.*
2. Then to start the xbee configuration type: /dev/tty.usbserial-A1000RMU 9600
3. This should hopefully get you to a blank screen, then type AT command: +++
4. If all is good you should get an “OK”
5. So the first thing you want to configure is the network
6. Type “ATID” to see what the Xbee’s current network is
7. To change it, type “+++” then “ATIDxxxx” (xxxx being some number to represent the network)
8. Type “ATID” again to make sure it updates to the new network
9. Type “ATMY” which describes the current Xbee
10. Type “ATMYxxxx” to change the Xbee’s “name”
11. “ATDH” should be set to “0″
12. Type “ATDLxxxx” to assign which Xbee to talk to
13. Finally after making all the changes, type “ATWR” to save the changes

This is pretty straight forward, but one thing that is annoying is that it writes over itself. It’s tough to see if it made any changes at all so I found myself retyping AT commands again just to make sure all the assignments are correct. Once these Xbees get configured, I moved onto setting up an Arduino to pass serial information wirelessly to another Xbee hooked up to another Arduino. More to come in Part 2.

So I am working on the arduino with 3-axis accelerometer. Here is an Arduino code so the LEDs are on unless there is a change in position or orientation the LEDs blink.

//Midnight Doodler w/accelerometer

int analogX, analogY, analogZ = 0;
int tempanalogX, tempanalogY, tempanalogZ = 0;
int speedBlink = 1000; //one second intervals
int caseStatus = 0;

// led pins
int ledX = 13;
int ledY = 12;
int ledZ = 11;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(ledX, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledY, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledZ, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {

analogX = analogRead(0);
delay(5);
analogY = analogRead(1);
delay(5);
analogZ = analogRead(2);

Serial.print(”X”);
Serial.println(analogX,DEC);
Serial.print(”Y”);
Serial.println(analogY,DEC);
Serial.print(”Z”);
Serial.println(analogZ,DEC);
delay(15);

// filtering analog readings
if ((analogX < 100) && (analogX > 200)){
if (analogX != tempanalogX) {
caseStatus = 1;
tempanalogX = analogX;
}
}
if ((analogY < 100) && (analogY > 200)) {
if (analogY != tempanalogY) {
caseStatus = 2;
tempanalogY = analogY;
}
}
if ((analogZ < 100) && (analogZ > 200)) {
if (analogZ != tempanalogZ) {
caseStatus = 3;
tempanalogZ = analogZ;
}
}

// LED blinking

switch(caseStatus) {
case 1:
digitalWrite(ledX, LOW);
delay(speedBlink);
digitalWrite(ledX, HIGH);
delay(speedBlink);
digitalWrite(ledX, LOW);
break;

case 2:
digitalWrite(ledY, LOW);
delay(speedBlink);
digitalWrite(ledY, HIGH);
delay(speedBlink);
digitalWrite(ledY, LOW);
break;

case 3:
digitalWrite(ledZ, LOW);
delay(speedBlink);
digitalWrite(ledZ, HIGH);
delay(speedBlink);
digitalWrite(ledZ, LOW);
break;

default:
digitalWrite(ledX, HIGH);
digitalWrite(ledY, HIGH);
digitalWrite(ledZ, HIGH);
}

}

For my Nature of Code final, I decided to move away from a conversation analysis/visualization from midterm. Midnight Doodler is a drawing tool that uses the night sky as the “canvas” and a kite with controllable LEDs to create lines made visible through long exposure photography. The LEDs can be controlled by either a accelerometer driven light patterns (auto-pilot) or manually controlled LEDs using momentary switches using an xBee radio for wireless communication.

A clear windy evening (~18 m.p.h. winds) is ideal weather conditions. Two users are necessary, but more are welcome. One user is the piloting the kite and the other user controls the LED lights through momentary switches. The LEDs can be dynamically driven by the accelerometer (auto-pilot) or manually turned on/off using momentary switches and xBee wireless radio communication. The camera will need to be set on a tripod and set to ‘manual’ to slow down the shutter speed.(Suggested settings: 100ISO and f22 at 1 minute exposure) Wide angle lens offer more “canvas” area for the light drawing kite.

References

Pika Pika
Uttarayana, Indian Kite-flying Festival
GRL
Charlie Brown

During my research of long exposure photography, I stumbled upon a group of people who attach LEDs on a frisbee to create light drawings. I thought it was interesting because a great deal of information of the frisbee’s path can be seen in the image. You can even see how much time has elapsed with the light streaks created by the stars.

I did some long exposure tests using a LED light pen that I created. I’m using a canon G7, iso100, f11, 15 seconds long exposure shutter speed to shoot down an ITP hallway to test the strength of different LEDs, specifically super LEDs (10,000 mcd).

So during Spring Break, I decided to catch up and work on the kite’s components. I decided to perfboard an Atmel8 circuit of a bare bones Arduino with an accelerometer sensor. Here is a picture of the bottom and top of the perfboard (Note the accelerometer is not shown so that the whole board can be seen easily). I mirrored the image on the left so that you can see easily were it corresponds with the top of the perfboard. I have a 3.3 voltage regulator to power the entire board. the bottom horizontal line of female headers is where the accelerometer will go that will cover the Atmel8 chip up until the 16 mhz clock (silver thing). The left hand vertical female headers are 5 analog ins. Just on the right of the Atmel8 chip, are a line of digital ins and out. The bottom 2 are RX and TX (to be hooked up to an xbee radio, also not shown) and the row of 7 female headers are digital ins and outs (to be used for the super bright LED modules on the kite).

So I started constructing my kite by laying out a sheet of plastic and wooden dowels to see what scale I will be working with. I’ve cut out a 4′ x 4′ square, then trimmed off the sides to fit my drawing dimensions. I decided to make a Rokkaki kite design, mostly because it seems to be an easy construction. I will definitely make others so I can test the best flight patterns.

Since this is a pretty straightforward standard Rokkaki kite design, I spent little time in the design phase. This is as technical as it’ll get, folks.

Here’s a good look at the ITP physical computing lab and how I took up an entire table.

I want this to be kite to be easily assembled and disassembled so there will not be much wood carving. I am pretty much going to lay wooden dowels on top of each other and twist wire at the joints.

This is probably the most difficult part of construction. I am taking strips of plastic form the edges I’ve cut to build sleeves for the wooden dowels. I melted the plastic pieces together using a soldering iron. I definitely practiced on scraps to see how much pressure is needed. It was easy to apply too much pressure and burn a hole right through the other side.

If you take a closer look you can see the longest wooden dowel I did first then started to attach two pieces (one at each side) the “wings.” I will eventually cut a hole just where the wooden dowels cross and tightly wrap some wire.

Now I had to figure out how I was going to place the 4 diagonal wooden dowels. I cut them in advance and noticed I needed longer length. Let this be a reminder: measure twice, cut once.

I just quickly wrapped some scrap wire to see how the structural integrity would be like. For the final version I will find a much cleaner why to wrap the wires.

I haven’t decided yet whether or not the diagonal wooden dowels should have sleeves to tighten up the frame. This design allows a slight twist along the spine of the kite with two triangle frames to maintain the “wings.” This prototype looks promising.

ITP prides itself for bring diverse students from all backgrounds and cultures together under one program. Today as I begin construction of my kite, Mooshir overlooked my kite layout and we began talking about kite-making. I mentioned to him my plans for my kite and how I am flying kites at night and he mentioned in his home country of India there is a celebration called Uttarayan (January 14th). During this day, people of all ages fly kites. He also mentioned that people also attach candle lit lantern to kites so that they can fly at night. In all my research of kite flying at night, I was unable to find any kite flying at night, so hearing about this was fantastic. This night flying kites seems to get more optimistic day by day. If candle light can be seen in the sky, I’m sure super bright LEDs will.

The ITP community gathered last night in celebration of Clay Shirky’s new book, “Here Comes Everybody.” Clay also gave a presentation describing his intentions and summarizing the key points of his book. The overall point Clay made was that the Internet has made forming groups much easier and improving: sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action between people. These effects are the same ones I want to recreate for my thesis project, TeleBanter. By connecting people using technology but ultimately using vocal communication through the mobile phone. Big congrats to Clay as well as big thanks for his feedback about my project.

Photographs taken by Heather Rasley.