Jentian [Jenna.Gavin]

PICAXE Radio Transmitter and Receiver

This is the working prototype for the wireless compass unit.  A digital compass is sending a bearing to a radio transmitter, via a Picaxe 08M2 microcontroller (RED SIDE), while the radio receiver waits for the signal and sends it to the computer via another Picaxe (YELLOW SIDE), through the serial cable (not shown).

Compass Direction

The Electronics Plan

HMC6352 compass -> PICAXE 08M2  -> radio transmitter -> radio receiver -> computer serial input.

The radio transmission will send the compass bearing in 2 parts. The transmission also needs a header and a checksum on the end.

Over the last 2 days, I think I have succeeded in getting the compass connected to the picaxe and the bearing into my computer. I borrowed some code from the picaxe forums and it seems to function as expected. I am getting 2 numbers, and as David J Barnes explains,

“These readings come back as a high and a low byte. Ie b0=1 through 14 and b1=0-255. After playing with the numbers for a few moments it became obvious. 14 x 255 = 3570 or ~3600 which makes for simple math.”

Now I need to get cracking on the radio transmitters and receiver. I’ve had some help from tutor Julian Priest on how to send and receive serial data and implement a checksum.

To Do

Three weeks left in the semester, and I think I’m at the point where I’m ready for the break.

I’ve got 2 things to do this weekend: Philosophy and Studio. For our paper Theories and Philosophies of Technology, we have to pose a question and explore it either through a 3000 word essay or another type of media. Such a broad scope. I’m working with the talented Emile Drescher on a question about media consumption. We have decided to do some comic strips / panels discussing various issues and philosophers. So I have to come up with a few ideas. I feel like most of the class has not been engaged with the critical and philosophical side of their arguments. Hardly a philosopher has been mentioned! I wanna crank out the big names like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Emile Durkheim, Noam Chomsky….

The other thing is to make some progress with Studio. It’s been an uphill battle getting anything to work and I feel like so much time has been spent on finding technical solutions and not enough time on WHY we are doing the project and WHAT the CONCEPT behind it is. I want to love what I’m doing and I can’t. Anyway I’ve bought 3 digital compasses and some picaxe microcontrollers and I’m hoping I can pair the two together, and then attach some radio transmitters so I can send the bearings wirelessly. That is the plan, but I don’t know if it’s possible yet! The end result *should be* that you can have a compass on a helmet on your head, telling a remote computer what direction you are facing.

Shadow Game finished!

It’s been a busy week finishing our game for the hand-in yesterday. We were working up until the due date, but it is a functioning product so I’m very proud of what we achieved. We had a lot of fun actually *playing* the games we made, so that counts for a lot. There are still some things left to alter and fix but it will have to wait until the holidays.

The game was designed by Thomas Hall, Matt Martin (Marty) and myself. We got the initial inspiration from our tutor Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath, and I think he’s been very excited to see this game come to life. Teams verse each other to create silhouette shapes, trying to match the displayed picture as closely as possible.

Thomas drew/sourced the silhouette images to play with, and made a button with a 4 metre cable so the team can take pictures while posing. Marty programmed the navigation, setup and highscore screen, as well as finding and adding sounds. I programmed the general functions, including taking the pictures with the webcam and calculating the scores. We used Processing (with libraries Minim and GSVideo), a Logitec webcam and Windows to run the game.

Indoor Positioning/Tracking System

We have found some progress on this network project finally. We want to create a virtual reality mapped to a physical environment. This requires us to track people within an indoor space. I figure this is a suitably challenging project in itself! It’s harder than it sounds because GPS only works for large distances, and smartphones have trouble with accuracy when calculating distance travelled.

There are a couple of approaches that are proven, one using cameras and a fair amount of clever programming (by Nils Siebel), the other using ultrasound and triangulation (MIT Cricket Indoor Location).

We have a month to research, experiment and get something functional. I feel a lot better about our position now; it seems to have fallen into place as soon as we moved from the digital realm to a physical space. It’s just a lot of work to do now.

Also it’s New Zealand Sign Language Week so… party on!

Bugs in the Processing Machine

Something changed on my MacBookPro recently that has messed up the video capture in Processing. It was working fine 2 weeks ago and now when I try to run a piece of code using processing.video / capture.run() it presents an error.  Had I updated/changed the java runtime, or quicktime, or something to do with display drivers? Firefox? Maybe? I tried to find something online but haven’t so far. I went to JavaTester.org/version.html to check my java version, and the funny thing is when I go back to Processing, the capture function is working again!

So I have to have this particular page open in Firefox for my video capture to work??! If only I knew what was going on. Might do some re-installs of Processing/Firefox/Quicktime/Java and see what happens.

Network groupwork

Thoughts on the Network Group Project so far.

Let’s start with a confession: I am struggling to stay motivated with this project. I haven’t managed to find an equilibrium between developing my own individual ideas and dedicating my mind to groupwork. My state of mind is uninspired, and I think that’s because the group has not come up with a proposal that will be sufficiently interesting. We barely have any ideas about what to produce as the end result. The general feeling is that although we get on well enough, the group’s ideas are incompatible. Each individual’s ideas do not interest the rest of the group enough for everyone to jump on board and shout “YEAH LET’S DO THIS!”. It’s very draining, every day.

It’s a matter of leadership. The brief did not provide a single direction to go in, and our team doesn’t have a leader to move forward with a proposal, which leaves us floundering.

This brings us to the current situation. The Ant program that I put together in a matter of days was well received by the tutors, James essentially saying to me to continue with this and develop its depth. I have a vision for a kind of art/interactive installation and I believe it is very achievable by June. Maybe it is too achievable, and only needs 1-2 people to take it to completion. I don’t know. But it is now the one solid project that we have and could present as a proposal next week in the critique sessions. I guess that puts me in the leadership (and programming) role to make sure it is achieved.

I’d like the group to take it further, and think about other ways an ant colony model could be used and morphed. Is it possible to do it physically rather than through a virtual program? Could we use electronics? Could we take it to the street with GPS and iPhones, like some kind of geo-caching game?

The issue? Ant colonies interest me, while I know that the rest of the group are luke-warm on the subject, and probably want to keep experimenting with senses/unity/perception/something else entirely.

Blind cooperative drawing

All week the group has been trying to use senses to explore networks and communication. Yesterday we spent some time creating a drawing together, to see how losing the sense of sight would affect our function and our communication.

The first experiment all four of us closed our eyes to draw a city together. There was no pre-planning so it came out fairly organically. We tried to connect a road completely around the edge of the paper, which was almost achieved. I liken our blind selves to a distributed network topology, each of us independent and communicating freely with each other. There was no greater plan, no leader, no restrictions.

The second experiment was to mimic a centralised network topology. One of us (me) would be able to see the paper and direct the other three where to draw. My hypothesis was that the city would turn out more organised and unified. Was I wrong? It was harder to control three independent blind nodes than I thought! They were not communicating with each other anymore, only me, so I felt overloaded and they felt under-utilised. Discussing it afterwards, we all felt that the overall result was less satisfying. The three blind people lost the relationship to their own drawings, because I had taken control of their hand positions. The map in their heads was not as successful because the control and communication had been handed over to someone else. The design of the city became “somebody else’s problem”.

Read More

Senses and Communication Channels

The group has been thinking about disabling one or more of our senses as a way to disrupt our normal network and communication channels. We wonder if this will create a united network, centralised towards a particular purpose. With the loss of hearing, sight, hands and/or speech, will that make us more inclined to work as a single unit? It would mean relying on each other and being there to assist each other. We tried a couple of things today with each of us losing one particular sense. Did it change the topology of our group? It’s hard to tell.

Initially we wanted to create a closed game/experiment using a group of people we could observe. The trouble was coming up with a game that could achieve a real-world result. I looked into the games of ‘game theory’, which have such specific rules and statistical outcomes, but we are not scientists or mathematicians and a predicting outcomes is not the goal.

I still feel stuck on the whole brief, like nothing is really ‘clicking’ for me. Something is due by next week but we haven’t ‘made’ anything yet (and I think the whole point of studio is to make something). Perhaps documenting existing centralised networks would be the best option?

Pub Quiz

Just won the Auckland Uni Pub Quiz tonight, which feels pretty special. Special in the kind of way where your team name is called and you believe it must be a team with a similar name because there is no way that you scored high enough to beat everybody else, in fact you should be on the very bottom of the heap. Here are some things we didn’t know:

George Stephenson invented the world’s first public railway line. Lockheed invented the TriStar airliner. The ship’s computer in Red Dwarf is called Holly. A painted lady is a type of butterfly. Coffee (reportedly) is the most recognisable smell in the world. The Italian word describing a dry wine is secco. Bean sprouts come from mung beans. The leek is the national vegetable of Wales. Henry James wrote the novel The Ambassadors in 1903. Beer was first canned in the 1930’s. The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot was the name for the American / Japanese Battle of the Philippine Sea in WW2.

Idea: Triggering Unity

Idea: Triggering Unity

High-level Description: What catalysts / triggers cause a breakdown of an existing network into the permanent or temporary formation of a new topology? Specifically what transforms a decentralised or distributed network into a centralised network? 

We are interested in the unifying nature of centralised networks, and how these come to exist through an event or trigger. There may be many ways of triggering unity, through fear, panic, authority, fun, common goals or experiences, rewards, re-routing.

From L. Roberts and B. Wessler: A centralised network has a single hub/point which acts as a conduit to transmit messages. All nodes connect to this point and thus it provides a common connection.

(Roberts, Lawrence G.; Wessler, Barry D. (1970), “Computer network development to achieve resource sharing”, AFIPS ‘70 (Spring): Proceedings of the May 5–7, 1970, spring joint computer conference, New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 543–549, doi:10.1145/1476936.1477020 .)