Cloud PIR sensor failure

Looks like the cloud PIR sensor will not work on the cloud balls. But it will detect people motion ( I have a nice use for this ) .

Microsoft gadgeteer

Just saw a gadgetter processor in the lab. 


Nice for building - less work connecting but more work programming. Processor much more powerful  (16Mb of ram) but the whole thing is much more expensive than the Arudio. Reminds me of the sunSpot. nice but the complexities of getting java working was just to much. 


perhaps this is better. 

mirrors -

This time they are english.

Jeff found these people they did the front side mirror for the table ( very good mirror it is too).

Useful on the parts list front.

New Table

This time it runs on a Mac ( nice) . Bendy, makes you wonder what kind of projector they are using.

Lovely bit of work but the plasma/lcd based ones are coming along so well I think we will not be seeing these for long.

Guzumped

A couple of years ago ( really was it that long ?) I worked on trying to unpick the signals from Diamond touch and then spot both fingers. Well I wrote a simple version and got about 80% success rate from it - not bad. I wrote it up but the paper got rejected ( mostly due to poor success rate )

I've thought of a better mechanism one that would handle multiple fingers ( more than two ) but the implement is quite difficult and with the cloud and the table I've never had enough time to really sit down and spend the 5 days it would take to redo.

Well in the mean time someone had managed to do something and get it published! Impressive the paper reads really like the one I wrote but this one managed to get published and it had an 80% success rate.

I'm not that miffed - I had got distracted on other things. But I did feel it was more fundermental - makes implementing 2*1D tables very possible.

I'm more irritated with my self someone else managed to do a multiple mice paper - which was technically much easier but I never managed to think of the useage case ( again side tracked on the table + cloud).

Microsoft Surface arrives

Just before I had to go home to get kids from school  - more play in the morning  - heavy, comes with  fiducals. More later

PIR infrared sensor info

very nifty.

Back to square one

Almost litrarally. With the failures over the weekened everyone is helping out getting the cyber tiles working. Image of Paul grooving one tile, Jeff has been 'Mr Electricity' too. We've gone for a bus design with a change of edge connectors.

Paul is talking to the dean about getting funding for more display research to help the faculty.

continuing...

R is here and things are running along nicely with the floor. We are becoming Aurdiono central at the moment. Incidentally Aurduino have updated there stuff with a new bigger board and a faster CPU. Tinkerit are now selling an ethernet connection and someone has done a DHCP for the ethernet sheild

I've been bogged down with exam writing, Msc projects which look completely brain dead and a Phd first year viva. So not much help there. Hopefully Paul and I will have time to write up atrium study for next Thursday ( I think).

Simon has disappeared midst rumours of he getting a huge influx of assistance and full time PHD students. I didn't see much of him at Chi - He seemed to ignore the sessions completely.

Looking back for me Chi2009 was very reassuring. There is a 80% rejection rate but the stuff that gets in isn't that good. Or as one paper put it the chances of getting best paper were no different from randomness. Ended up with Tom R and Yvonne and Steve B playing if HCI person was a rock-star which rock-star would they be (seemed funny at the time). What else well I found CHI very friendly and I bumped into so many people I knew it was great. I really really want to put a paper in for next year.

igiGht -

Company callled Immersion are making a nice table - caught my eye due to boxy nature. 

http://www.ilight-3i.com/

No sense of how much.

http://www.crayonphysics.com/ the immersion guys go this going on a table nice.

Iphone idears Digital jitney

Having had the iphone for a few days now I have had a few more idears about what you could do with it.
The gps is they good and I realised that you could implement a great eco transport tool. To make it work you would need two iPhone apps and a web server.

App 1.

If you want to go from a to b you press the summon button on your specially down loaded iPhone app.
Your origin and destination are compared to a list of shared Taxis running in the city.
If some part of your route matches a near by taxi it is redirected to you. If not fresh one is dispatched.
Your phone gets a Ok response a time a price and expected journey time.
You enter your credit details on the iPhone app and effectively pay over the web.
The journey time is in a range the taxi your getting may or may not change route according to who calls it.
The taxi arrives - its larger than normal and can take 4-6 people.
You share the taxi for part of the route which means you share the cost.
The taxi driver has a Iphone/Tomtom app which is dynamically updated from the central server. It gives directions which it the driver uses to wave through the city to the next pickup./drop off (these can change dynamically).
Taxi drops you off at near your destination.

So what do you get for this.
1. You get taxi like service (origin/destination travel)
2. The taxi may take longer than a pure taxi. - It might stop for others.
3. You get 1/N (where N is the number of passengers ) cost.
So if you imagine that you manage to share the taxi with 4 other people you get 1/4 cost. So an £8 ride becomes a £2 ride - not bad.

The city gets something between a taxi service and a bus service. The taxi doesn't move until someone wants to go some where so you avoid empty bus syndrome. The taxi is fuller than a taxi or car so you get more efficent movement with out sacrificing safety or door to door movement.

Transparent computing

A voice emanating from the stairs. I once did a program for Lucy Kimble that took her speaking digits and had it counting down from 1000000 in a station. If you heard voices in the stairs perhaps you might turn to investigate?

I once wanted to use speech synthesis and recognition to make verbal bandwidth, one computer would talk to another, sending bytes by speaking them and the other listening converting back to binary. The idea was to have a very slow network connection between to networks were you could hear the flow of information, so you could listen to the internet. Might be able to get reasonable bandwidth by having a number of speaking tubes.

Cursed and not so cursed research.

Had a skype meeting with Yvonne and Richie yesterday. Richie is in the US and is going to come over and prototype a physical visualisation of the movement experiment.  We are going to come up with ways to visualise the data. 

Richie is on for repeating the experiment in the US.

The cursed experiment is on hold for two days due to the snow. This won't effect the validity of the final experiment. 

I've been reading up about FLEX sounds intreasting I'm going to get it running on my mac. Perhaps I can do the zoomable interface idea again but this time in real time on mac and PC with minimal load time. I've been trying an other touchSimulator - not wildly impressed but I like the transparency stuff. 

And this is worth a look two.

links for the day touch light

News on the arduinio ethernet stuff.

Looks like the very nice ethernet shield from Nuelectronics won't run the standard Arduino ethernet libraries from Ardunio central. It does have it's own library which is a little tricky. 

The alternative is to buy the 'offical' ardunio sheild from Smart Projects in Italy. ( 31 Euro - so about 25 pounds plus postage against about 13 plus for a simpler programming experiance. 

I wish they would make the whole thing a bit more explicit. 

I'm thinking of replacing the sunspot with the remote processing/Firmata and running the code hot to the server ( which I got working with sensor 3 today). 

There is also anouther board based on Xport - pricy, and you can't buy it ready made and you have to buy the bits seperatly BUT it does have DHCP working out of the box ( + own mac address). 

I found the make controller  which is a UBS/Ethernet with more memory and DHCP. The interface to the outside world is via OSC (yum) and you cam programming it. Looks to be based on the ARM chip. About £68 + shipping from the US.  So not so bad. Looks very simple to interface to as well. Quite close to my ideal machine in many ways.  Has in built eithernet but no simple digital in(s) only analogue.

More useful links on building tables

More useful links on Silicon building for zero force tables. 

Sunspots

I've finally mastered getting the sunspots to talk, but the electical side went off the wall

Final and working configuration. 

1. Stick wires directly in the board. 

2. Need gnd, +3volt and D1 ( we are making a divider ) 

Need to check out Maplins - what would they suggest for putting in the board to keep stuck in.

Sun spots

The sunspot people came and gave a talk today. I managed to get a loan of 2 +base station. Very nice they have ZigBee + battery so all the communication is sorted out for you (neat). I'm going to build one to do the floor sensing job. I had a meeting with Yvonne about visualising both choice of route (walking/lift) AND had the measurement of building buzz.

Paul is going to sit and draw some tracks through the ground space. 

More hard ware

I've been talking to paul about which hardware to get for the floorstickies project (digit-stickies). Looks like we will get one very powerful projector for the floor and two more for tables (including on LED one). 

Also the Arduino's are turning up with the Xbee transmitters by the end of the month. 

I've left the mac mini running in the floor collecting sound but I have problems remotely connecting to it. Need to sort out a longer cable for the vibration sensor.