derBlog

Trying to get the kids to wear helmets when cycling is never an easy thing. And I’m not the best example either. Don’t think the boys quite old enough to appreciate these helmets (they prefer dragon and flame graphics), but I think these Yakkay helmets pretty cool for the urban (ad urbane) cyclist.

More designs on the Yakkay site.

/der

Just read a really interesting article from the November issue of Wired Magazine on open source hardware. The lead-off is all about the Arduino, big props to Massimo Banzi and his group. I was a little disappointed that the article doesn’t explain Arduino’s relationship with Processing. I would think that part of Arduino’s success is precisely that relationship and the early market of users Arduino found in the Processing community. There was definitely a need for easy-to-use and inexpensive microprocessor units that Arduino fills but having an entire community of programmer already using the language needed to program your hardware certainly didn’t hurt!

The rest of the article talks about several other open source hardware folks like Limor Fried (Adafruit) and David Rowe, discussing the business model of open source hardware. I think the moreThe interesting point here is the use of the hive-mind…collective intelligence….whatever you want to call it…to solve complex problems or to simply improve a project more quickly that any one hacker could do by themselves…sounds a lot like an academic art studio should work…

Read the article here.

Thanks to Clay for giving me the article!

/david

So, I taught Digital Media II at Tulane this fall. It’s an intermediate course primarily focused on screen-based projects…web sites, Flash. It’s also the place that basic programming is introduced…Javascript, Actionscript. Because I had been reading Daniel Schiffman’s most excellent Learning Processing book earlier in the fall and telling my students about it, they asked to jump into some Processing. In the end, we went ahead and took it a step further to work with the Arduino physical computing platform as well.

By and large, I was very pleased with how it all went. It’s always a bit bumpy the first time you teach something, and as any teacher will tell you, you learn a lot about what you’re teaching as you teach it. The students really took to programming as a creative act. It wasn’t always without its frustrations, but they seemed to take it all with a good sense of humor and resolve.

I think they also found it liberating to crack some hardware open (I know I did!) and scavenge parts. We took apart an old cell phone to retrieve a microphone. We dissected a keyboard for another project. I think a great deal of working with electronics is fostering a certain level of comfort. And just showing students that, yes, you can open a piece of equipment, find interesting and useful stuff in there and nothing bad is going to happen to you is half the battle of getting them to think creatively about electronics.

The Processing/Arduino platforms are great for entry-level students too. If you read the hype surrounding these projects, that’s not saying anything new. But its absolutely true.

In the end, only one project worked: Alex’s doggie-garbage alarm. Anna’s keyboard hack with the light sensors never quite worked the way we wanted, but that didn’t really bother me. We were close and given a little more time (and a dedicated space would have been nice too), I think we would have gotten it. More exciting is that Anna plans to get her own Arduino and continue working on the project. How many times to you get students who plan to continue class work on their own time?!

It was a great experiment, and I really look forward to teaching a full semester of Processing and then another of Arduino…some day…gotta get a full-time teaching gig first…

You can see a few more pictures of the student projects in my Flickr stream.

/der

Can you hear me out there?

Been meaning to blog this for a while, but just haven’t sat down to do it. A new Twitter buddy, @oftenabsurd, looked through this blog and saw my fascination with bike geekery. She sent me a link to the Bike Furniture website…where all good bikes go to rest….if they don’t go to Plan B. There’s some interesting stuff here…twisting forms designed for one thing into another…sometimes literally…

Thanks to @oftenabsurd! (Follow her here)

So see…something of interest came of Twitter already…something to add to my thoughts here.

/der

This is one of the most coolest things I’ve seen in web browsing in a long time. Zoetrope, developed at Adobe’s Advanced Technologies Lab by Mira Dontcheva, is like an interactive time machine in your browser. There are site that archive web pages, but this tool allows you to scrub a specific web page (like you’re scrubbing a video) in real time.

From the paper’s website:

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familiar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

Here’s a link to the paper site. And to an article at the Technology Review. Make sure you watch the video. Amazing tech.

/der