The Testing Range is Complacent Chaos

I am making things, well, I say 'making stuff,' but same diff. And then there is MakingThings, the company. 'MakingThings provides modular mechanical, electronic and computational infrastructure for people who make kinetic and interactive systems, devices or machines.' Their Teleo product line looks cool, but sadly, it costs actual cash :-) Another feature in their favor is that their documentation is very very funny.

"If your program does something unexpected, don't proudly attribute it to chaos and emergent phenomena immediately, most often unexpected program behavior stems from bugs not new natural phenomena."

(much more rants and commentary on the topic of 'making') they seem like cool people doing interesting stuff. 'Our customer's projects require familiarity and experience with software, electronics, mechanical engineering, fabrication and other disciplines. Often this diverse set of skills is not present in a single individual or small team'

Aint that the truth! I spent more time than I care to recall on trying to get my simple two transistor circuit to work at switching from the 5 volt TTL voltages of the PC Parallel port, up to 24 volt sprinkler valves. And right now I am held back in my stepper motor control by those pesky 'H Bridges.' Then we get to mechanical engineering, fabrication and those ominous 'other disciplines.'

eek!

I am afraid to read about the things that I am interested in for fear that the 'outside' will corrupt my inner space. Strange fear, that one! Strange and non-productive! So I browsed the Making Things web site and found the Reeds project The 'reeds' quicer when people walk by. Interesting point: "Each reed is fitted with a little motor with an assymetrical weight on it to create the quivering effect."

Which triggers in me the beautiful focus on what we _can_ do, and not what we can not. For right this second I cannot control a stepper motor. But I can most empatically control 'small' DC motors. I can control the hell out of them using my sprinkler valve control circuit. The reeds, with the weight on the motor, make something different happen. Different from what I expected.

I am overwhelmed by my vision of the beauty of the NYU Wooden Mirror. I can hear the little wood blocks rustling like leaves as they adjust their little block faces to the proper angle. I've never seen the piece, never seen a picture, but my image, created from the descriptions of Tom Igoe and Ben Hammersley, is of a zen like calm...

But every single block is controlled, or I've been told, by a stepper motor. And the cheapest ones I have found, and I have two on order, are $8.95, and then require some sort of controller...and that seems overwhelming. But the Reeds...they do a similar thing, react in a positionally responsive way to external stimulus, and they do it with a single bit of information per reed. Just turn this motor on. Turn this motor off.

'Physical Computing' is the term used to describe that general interface between artists and geeks. Half the people who enter his classes are non-technical, almost? to the point of not being able to turn on a computer. These notes include tech stuff and URL's...

(These are my notes, and observations from Tom's talk. This is a mish mash of Tom's talk, and my thoughts on his talk. It is not always clear who said what. I am also extrapolating in places Sorry.)

Tom is a professor at the interactive telecom... Program at NYU. Tom's Physical Computing home page

During the course of the semester they design and build computerized art projects.

These are projects that live at the edge between art and technology. Things that are often 'easy' to do from the technical standpoint, but require a spark and a vision to bring physical artifacts into existence. Physical artifacts that implement an idea in electronics.

The physical computing program is for folks who are:

interested in hardware hacking
want to get their hands dirty
have little or no background in electronics

A former student of Tom's, and a FOAF (yury gitman, the creater of the award winning Node Runner game, and number one on the google search 'Wireless Art') introduced me to Tom before the talk. Yury graduated from NYU.

I told him that whenever I tried to hack hardware I ended up with solder burns and a pile of destroyed parts. He smiled and said that meant that I was doing it right. If only I had realized that in 1985, I'd be a different person today. Well, at the least I would have more solder burns.

They have an 'interactive design track' (check spelling) where they operate from this quote:

Interactivity is a cyclic process in which two actors alternatively listen, think, and speak." chris crawford, understanding interactivity

This makes me think of my different yard art ideas in a different way. Many of my ideas involve a single iteration in that process. The art becomes more compelling, more engaging, with each loop that is added to the iteration through the listen/think/speak loop.

The user reads a screen, or reads the 'text' implicit in the installation, thinks on it, and then pushes a button. The computer then listens, thinks, and speaks...

Do we have interaction when you turn on a light switch? Absolutely. You listen to the text created by the existence of the light switch. You think about your decision to change the state of the light (assuming that you have bought into the basic premise that the switch actually does something understandable and linear), and then you act by altering the state of the switch.

The switch 'listens' for the change in state, processes that change, and then speaks by zipping them electrons on through the gap... And you can repeat this process ad infinitum.

But that conversation isn't going anywhere. The electronic Foosball table (see below) has the same conditions. It supports the desired actions of the users, but it does not engate the user in a conversation. The jello instrument does...

I don't always want to be in a conversation! I am happy to turn the lights on by pushing a button. I also read trashy fiction more often than Shakespeare.

I'm interested in conversation with a twist. The Hello Fountain idea...a person passes by my house, and is greeted with playful fountains spurting up in response to their presence. As they walk past, fountains spurt up in order, or out of order. All in reaction/interaction to the actions of the person passing by.

So what is a computer? Tom has the students draw a computer. Invariably people draw a keyboard, mouse and screen...

Then he showed his slide "How we see the computer" (as a pile of componenents, and "how the computer sees us," (as a hand with an eyeball...as a dwarf-handian (?).

The work of physical computing differs from robotics. Physical Computing compared to robotics:

low level of autonomy vs high level of autonomy.
focus on input vs focus on output
simple programming relies on user intelligence vs complex programming that relies on machine 'intellegence'

We are used to having easy to use scripting tools. Perl is an example. With perl you can do quick and dirty software hacks that are powerful and easy to create. This whole model breaks down when we enter into the physical world. We expect to be able to hack software easily. We have no such expection on the hardware side.

Tom's work is all about enabling people to make these sorts of 'what if' statements at the hardware level.

'What if we could make a foosball table that keeps score automatically?"

Physical computing is all about 'Transduction,' the conversion of one form of physical energy into another.

Look at one form of energy and convert it to another...pushing a button turns mechanical energy into electrical....etc through the range of real world applications

(After this are URL's and fragmentary notes)

Forest Mims ... patron saint of physical computing

And now on to some meat...

Common microcontrollers...they are just a computer. bx24 microcontroller mem, voltage serial io ports and cpu... basic stamp 2 www.parallaxinc.com great place to start. great educational tools available... but...slow, and expensive vs PIC but once you blink the LED it is all downhill from there...you can do anything once you blink the LED! $35-40 apiece, so too much for starving art students. So now they use: BX-24 www.basicx.com faster better basic more features but fewer code samples available and still expensive relative to the BS-2 The mainstay of his work... PIC www.microchip.com -steeper learning curve a few more components harder to use but the most expensive pic is $10, cheapest under a dollar... The easy software environments are not free... needs an external programmer... used to need uv eraser... irc comment is that open source compiler exists...maybe gcc... javelin www.parallaxinc.com programmed in java wicked expensive, 80 apiece There are others, but these three or four do everything he needs... Sensors human to device conscious vs unconscious actions c. primary focus to send computer something uc. has other primary purpose... ex. person left room, primary purpose is to get out of room because he is bored, but computer can detect it... c. physical action should be clear and obvious... ex. where is the eject button for the cd on the Mac G4 tower... ie: where are the switches. uc. physical affordance may not be obvious. ex. scary anti theft detectors in Barnes and Noble are way obvious... c. sensing is ofen in a very contained area uc. wide area... c ex. buttons, switches, etc card swiper uc ex door entry floor triggers faucet sensors - should be a bit better!j motion detectors Discete vs continuous sensing (digital vs analog) discrete: discrete number of states...often just two. continuous: analog...sense a continuous, bounded range of states. resolution is theoretically infinite, but is constrained by A-D conversion Look at the application...how much resolution does it need? then double it. light - photocells heat - thermistors (chair sensor based on butt heat) The real world is messy! don't discount that...incorporate it into your project. Touch...capacitive field sensor Quantum QT113H - cool $3 chip. A mesh, like screen cloth-could have been wired to the easter egg foil Force sensitive resistors www.interlinkelec.com feliforce.com flex sensor www.jameco.com www.digikey.com Conductive rubber - press stuff www.allcorp.com other surplus retailers... Infrared Ranger Sharp GP2D12 - radio shack ir motion detector 49-426 is the same thing and then hack on the led... Did something cross my path? polaroid sonar ranger, ultrasonic ranger www.acroname.com lots of sensors here the polaroid makes noise object tracking video cmucam nice board...packaged camera w. microcontroller and serial port. can get image or x/y of brightest object on screen. costs about $100 track them colors www.smoothwae.com cyclops and jitter www.cycling74.com for Cycling 74's Max/MSP big eye www.stteim.nl Acoustic sensing... simple... sound level via piezo is easy use multiple piexos to one microcontroller for rough triangulation is possible. Complex... Frequency analysis via fast fourier transforms not easy on microcontroller, best done on desktop pc. "Go get a low end PC, throw it into the bottom of your project..." There is no operating system...infinite loops are okay. Everytime you do something, it is all you are doing...no event loop. so if you have a 'pause' you are not receiving your input... Device to device.. mostly serial we are just connecting blocks of things to do something, we don't care how those things do it. Just pulsing a wire on and off... Once you solve the problem of getting the wires connected it is software... Why not attach these to the net? ethernet is just another form of serial, so all you need is a microcontroller taht can deciper ethernet packets...an ethernet controller... www.embeddedtether.net embeddedethernet.com www.edtp.com/packetwhacker.htm (slide of a packet sniffer connecgted to a piano, every packet plays a note) Serial to ethernet modules higher level siteplayer.com $30 web server web interface udp send and recieve serial to talk to microcontroller 10 minutes and you are up! they made 30 banquest table centerpieces! cobox micro lantronix.com no web interface open a port and data is going... 2 serial ports really nice for unix programmers telnet into it, open a port. i he has a siteplayer attached to a fan. If a student hits his page looking for notes, he gets a little breeze. Wireless! radio -omni -large distances -good for many to many -higher power infrared -directional -shorter distances -good for one to one -lower power abacom.com links? RF pulse an ir led then read a photo diode... once you've lit the led, it is all downhill, even if it is an infrared led samples of student work... Big Brother foosball goals connected and card reader to track who is playing. There is only one concsious action-swiping their card... Jellophone by michael sharon... and because he is a bit of a freak, he likes to play with jello... squeeze jello and you hear notes...great fun Flight Simulator for birds...wired stuff to themselves and you flap your wings, lean, etc! They didn't know enough code to leave the trees on the ground, so the trees fly with you... :-) all of this is stuff you can get your hands on now! itp.nyu.edu/tigoe/pcomp bioinformatics, like hand readings, very off the shelf but 3-400 bucks each. siemens makes a mouse that has a fingerprint reader for $100 802.11b dev kit? iosoft.co.uk/wlan.php (broken url) someone talked about ambiant orb... and oem gps's are out there... the guy took a 'taplight' as a good container and put in led's and wierd epoxy hooked to a pic and an RF tx/rx to a serial... A Cool Taplight project Cormac also talked about the slimp3 ... an mp3 player with a rj45... with a two line display... how about a search engine voyers to a little display as a break the ice tool...you are at a party, not sure what to talk about... passive devices rock.

I've been fiddling with real world control in a small way. Major success is that I can turn 0-8 LED's on, or off, via the parallel port. This is a major achievement because it moved my near 20 year fetish with real world control from fantasy into the realm of the real.

much more on this topic... Note: Not into the realm of the 'cutting edge,' but into reality. I have a little board with eight LED's, and the LED's light up. Or go off.

The next move was to play with Servo Motors. A generous sould gifted me with a pic microcontroller based serial to servo motor controller, and the temporary loan of two servo motors.

Servo motors maintain their position, and can be controlled through an arc. These go 180 degrees. So you send a command and the appropriate server moves to where it should be.

Servo City has smaller servo's for $10-12, and up. The normal use for these servos is for radio controlled airplanes/boats/etc. You would attach a servo to the rudder of a boat, for example, and then when you turn a joystick the rudder would move from left to right.

You connect the controller to the serial port, then send commands to the serial port. Here is a command '0@' This means move the servo all the way to one side. '0|' This moves it most of the way to the other side. The '0' selects which servo (two on this board, but the design would support 8).

I'd paste a tiny snippet of Perl code that I was playing with this morning at 2:00 am, but something went wrong during this phase...

I wanted to see how fast I could cycle the motors from left to right, and the other way round. And somewhere in this code I sent a command that caused confusion, or something, and the upshot is that the computer no longer boots...

Which would be of no consequence at all, except that I was using a good computer...

But...it was a $40 Fry's special Motherboard, and it sort of sucked in strange and random ways, so it wasn't too bad. In fact, it was a good thing for three reasons:

It gives me an opportunity to revitilize a computer that was sort of marginal inspite of a 1.8 ghz Athlon. I don't need to mess with a flaky motherboard anymore because it is dead!

I learned a valuable lesson about designing and using io circuits. Optical isolation anyone?

I was barefoot, wearing just my robe, in the workshop at 2:00 am. If I hadn't blown out the computer, I WOULD PROABABLY STILL BE THERE, muttering under my breath and laughing evilly!

Last night was great, as I hung out in a bar and made a new best friend, who (based on IRC posts) Schuyler calls 'the most cynical person I know. Then back to codecon for the California Cooperative Colo Project benefit dinner.

Various folks were running around in hammer and sickel classic USSR/CCCP gear, including founder David Weekly in bright red shirt, looking younger than anyone with that much going for him should look.

I somehow ended up with a 'Premium Sponsor' dinner ticket, so I got to sit with Mitch Kapor, and Mike Korn (the creater of the Deep Green project) and some other folks who were cool.

Nobody said anything. At all. For an uncomforatably long time. Super tech hero Kapor said...diddly. He drummed his fingers, and adjusted his shirt, and got up and went 'places' but came back moments later. He looked bored or uncomfortable.

'Back in the day' I was a Lotus 123 person. Starting in fall of 1984 I spent huge amounts of time creating Lotus spreadsheet models. I created a complete inventory and menu costing system for a sandwitch shop while I worked at Compushare 'Personal Computer Timesharing' in Mesa Arizona...like, in 1985.

Then when we got to Colorado, and I set up my computer consulting and resale business, I longed to be a Lotus 123 retailer. Oh, but the process was painful. They were one of a mere handful of products in the Softsel catalog (pre-name change to Merisel) with the dreaded 'Authorized resellers only' notation.

Sure, I could see the prices, but I couldn't sell it... So Poor Richard's Computers applied to become Lotus 123 resellers.

And we were denied. They needed to maintain the purity of their distribution chain, or some crap, and so we the rifraff were kept out.

And then he went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and I went on to have cute kids and live life. And then something like 16 years later we found ourselves sitting at the same table.

And Mitch didn't say anything.

He didn't address the painful intersection of our lives in which his company (possibly after he left) refused to do business with my company. No. And he didn't address the great cause of the EFF. And he didn't say 'so how about those mets.'

I had dinner with Mitch Kapor and he literally did not say a single word. No one said anything for a long time. Then finally someone, I'm sorry that I'm horrible with names, based on my name tag, asked about NoCat .

And that was enough to get my engines running! And I mentioned the GIS stuff, and he asked about that, because he had a friend who was a GIS major.

Gulp! I'm just poking at this stuff on the side. I didn't realize that people actually _major_ in GIS.

But it went okay and we had fun sitting on the group W bench. And I'd glance at Mitch, hoping for a smile, a nod, a bit of appreciation. I felt like the overlooked son trying to gain recognition from the absentee father.

A strange way to feel. But I was having too much fun with it all. And then that subject was finished, and the table went back to quiet.

And the fellow accross from me was a speaker. Mike Korn. And the name rang a bell, and I tried to find my program in my bag, and failed, and finally asked.

And I had stumbled by luck into having dinner with the speaker of one of two talks (the other was Dan Kaminsky's talk ---- he's a freak in all the best ways) that I wanted to see.

And so the conversation turned to investment analasis. In summary, they have the equivelent of 3,000,000 market analysts running all of tht time, trying to make stock market picks. They then look at the picks of the top 50 'analysts' and act on them.

And they make money.

The whole point of their project is to do research into AI that is a profit center. In the bad times, no one cuts the profit centers.

(meanwhile, Mitch didn't say anything)

I felt at one point like I had the personal ability to control the conversation at that table...I felt that I could relieve Mitch of the discomfort of his boredom.

And yet I didn't.

And in hindsight it is sort of funny, in a karmic sort of way. The lesson is, be nice to random people whose very existence seems no more real then talking pelicans, because you might be at a dinner with them and be a bit bored.

Oct 1, 2007 - Hire me to do something...