Tinker it now!

This is an experiment based on “frustrated total internal reflection” aka FTIR.

This is a very basic demo and we did it just to see how it work and it took us just 4 days!

The most difficult part is seting-up the hardware, in the following list you can see what we used:

• 1 panel of plexiglass 8mm thickness
• 2 strips of IR LEDs (18 LED per strip)
• 2 sheets of tracing paper
• 1 projector
• 1 mirror
• 1 analog camera sensitive to IR light
• 1 IR filter for the camera
• 1 computer

The traking was done using vvvv.

here you can see some photos of the setup

the two LED strips its must be placed on the edges of the plexiglass panel (more strips and more LEDs is, of course, better).

here you can see what happen inside the panel when you touch it (FTIR) :

Image credit Jeff Huan http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/ftirschematic.gif

When you are done with this part most of the work is done!

Place the camera underneath the table, the camera must be IR sensible (almost all digital cameras, including webcams, are but they are usually fitted with an IR filter that cuts all the IR light. We must open the camera and remove it!).

Put a visible light filter in front of the camera (one of the best is just the black tail end of developed slide films).

Put the projector underneath the table with a mirror reflecting the image on the projection surface. This is needed just to be able to place the projector in a comfortable horizontal position and to gain a bit of image size.

ok have you done it?

connect all to the computer, download vvvv software from their web site (it’s not open source, but until you are using the software for non-commercial projects you don’t have to pay for using it!)

it’s a visual programming language, (like puredata, max-msp, eyesweb and so on) very easy to learn, very well done, and very robust.
Go though the tutorial, and, maybe in a couple of days you will be able to do very beautiful things.

Alessandro masserdotti
dotdotdot.it

You might have noticed that we had a couple of articles written by Ubi De Feo, also known as twodotone. I’ve decided to open up the blog to other contributors who are mainly people whom I collaborate with.

Expect to read soon from Alessandro Masserdotti from dotdotdot. You might remember him from being the guy wrote the webpage about how to make the perfect lasagna. Apart from being a great cook, Alessandro has spent the last year becoming a master of VVVV and has built a number of very nice installations. He will be sharing some of his experiment with us.

One thing my mentor always told me was that AVRdude behaves weirdly when it comes to writing fuses to an ATmega168.
Guess which µC I’ve rendered unusable this week trying to write fuses with AVRdude?
If your answer was “peanut butter jelly time” you might have some mental issues, while if it was “ATmega168″ you are right.
There’s more:
not content with having broken a loose one, I decided I had to try the one on the Arduino BT which in the end got to the same end.
The bad aspect of the latter is that the chip is SMD and can’t be replaced easily (by me).

You might be wondering what happened then.
Well, besides trying to have 2 ATmega128 end up the same way, I started wondering why I couldn’t write the efuse properly in AVRdude.
(more…)

Pushed by several tutorials on the matter, a few forum posts and the need of a programmer to write firmware to bare AVR microprocessors, I decided it was about time to make my own on the cheap.

Now which one is the cheapest option to build one without the need to create a PCB, solder etc?
Well, my friends, it’s our beloved Arduino board with a few hacks on the software and the hardware sides.

If you start from massimo’s post you can already build your own, but he doesn’t have much time to write about a more thorough process. I’m trying to execute this task with my first post on tinker.it, and I shall succeed!

Last week I had time to talk to massimo while in milan, and I had the luck to sit next to him while he was programming a couple of brand-new BT boards for me.
His AVR programmer died on him, and he is using an Arduino hacked to program his boards.

As I was telling him I didn’t have success in turning an Arduino into an AVR-ISP, he was explaining me that replacing the board crystal with a 3.6864 MHz one, would have led to a more successful result.

Today I started tinkering, and this is what I did:
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After a few months of work we finally opened up the tinker.it! website

We are starting a company dedicated to providing technology consulting to the design/art/architecture community.

At some point in our work we realised that the way creative people get to know about technology and how to use it was very “casual”, there was no company (that we knew of) that was completely dedicated to this.

We have been doing this for years but in a very “casual” way ourselves. Now, please welcome Tinker.it!

Tinker.it! makes products and platforms to help designers and artists make the best use of digital technologies. We cover the whole design and artistic process by providing early consultancy during the concept phase down to the implementation stage. Being part of the Arduino project means we are on the forefront of this business.

We work on three main areas of expertise:

• Disseminating knowledge by teaching workshops and classes in various institutions and companies around the world.
• “Experiences” are the new materials for designers and artists. We transform raw technologies into materials for creative people throught our interactive prototyping toolkit. We provide a catalogue of “experiences” that a designer or and artist can use in their projects.
• Consulting designers, artists and architect on how to use digital technologies in their projects. We start at the beginning of the creative process by helping you brainstorm and continue down to the production of small series, all with Italian quality.

One area I’m particuarly fond of is this concept that for the modern designer using technology , especially sensor technology, is becoming part their everyday life. This technologies are always presented in a very “nerdy” way that has nothing to do with the “experience” they provide to whoever uses them.

Starting from this point we have been building a toolkit and a “library” that allows creative people to experience these technologies and make the “experience” the material not the chip or the piece of technology.

At the moment there is very little out there about it.. we are testing it with our “beta” users and will start revealing more and more in the next few weeks…

Next stop the tinker.it! party in milan in march… See you there.

Massimo