Tinker it now!

Recently I was invited by Bruce Sterling to talk at the ToShare festival he was curating around the topic of “Manufacturing”.

I’ve always been fascinated by milling machines, 3d printers and the
whole concept of building object from designs made on a computer. This whole world in now crossing in interesting ways with the subject of generative art where you can generate shapes entirely from software, send them to these kind of machines and get finished objects.

I was sharing the stage with the great people from todo who ended their presentation mentioning the reprap machine and how it could use arduino as a controller.

reprap , short for “Replicating Rapid-prototyper” is an oingoing effort to produce a machine that can replicate itself. It’s essentially a 3D printer that can make objects from a design stored in a computer. The whole design is open and follows the principles of free software.

Well the news is that they have chosen Arduino for their new developments. You can read the details on their blog

I’m very excited to be part (even if a bit indirectly) of this effort.

If you’re a Flash developer and interested in Arduino, then do show up this Thursday at the CosmoBar for the London Flash Platform User group meetup.

As we couldn’t attend ourselves (I’m trapped under 10 feet of snow in Brussels) our very good friend Matt Biddulph will be talking about Hardware Hacking for Software Scripters.

Additionally, Alias Cummins who is leading our next workshop on Arduino + Flash, will be speaking about How to get Arduino and Flash to make wonders!

As a raffle prize, a very special workshop kit (with lots of additional goodies) will be given out during the event to excuse our physical absence :)

Check it out!

Update: Matt’s slideshow from that evening:

| View

A lovely Arduino workshop took place at Brighton BarCamp 2. Lead by Lincoln Smith, this event seemed to really have been enjoyed by all. We provided the gear people played around with during that day.

Arduino Wiimote Hack by Nigel Crawley from Jeremy Keith on Vimeo.

Update: More project links here, here and here.

++ Kind of old, but nice to remember why open source hardware is important.

++ Really expensive, but the pleasure of having Leah Buechley teach a 3 4 day Masters Class in Wearables next month makes it damn tempting.

Since the introduction of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) some Arduino BT users have had troubles programming and using their board.

I’ve done some testing to try to figure out how those issues could be solved. It is clear Apple has changed its Bluetooth stack in the move between Tiger and Leopard. This new stack seems to be less “forgiving” than the previous one.

In particular one of the most frequent complaints is that it has become very hard to upload programs over the bluetooth connection.

I think one of the main issues here is that Arduino (up to version 10) before uploading a program, connects to the board and removes any characters left in th serial buffer before launching avr-dude (the program used to upload code to the board). This works well with the regular Arduino with USB interface because opening and closing the connection takes next to nothing but the BT connections are a different case. BT connections are slow because of the amount of back and forth messaging that goes on betwen the computer and the BT module. To this we have to add a random amount of latency depending on how many BT and WiFi devices that are present in the area.

I’ve tested uploading from the command line and it works much more reliably than with Arduino 10.

To make along story short, I’ve made a number of test and found a combination of settings that works for me.

First of all you need the release candidate version of Arduino 11 prepared by David Mellis. In this version, the IDE no longer tries to connect to the board before uploading, improving the overall reliability of the upload process. You can download it here

I’ve also noticed that I got better results if I selected the serial ports beginning with /dev/tty. as opposed to the /dev/cu. that seem to work better with the USB board.

Another setting that seemed to improve the reliability of the upload process is to specify “require pairing for security” for the BT device in the bluetooth system preferences dialog.

You can see a screenshot of mine here:

I’ve also tested that the “serial monitor” function on the Arduino IDE doesn’t work very well with Arduino BT, using goSerial (despite the annoying popup dialog) gave much better results.

Well give my suggestions a try and let me know if this works for you.

As a bonus i’m going to add a script I have made called “virginizer”, like the program that fixes your iphone if you’ve done something bad to it.

This Mac OS X shell script uses an STK500V2 compatible programmer to:

• Initialise the BT board with the name ARDUINOBT and pin 12345
• Programs the bootloader and proper fuses
• Uploads a test program using the BT connection

In order to use this you need to change the name of the serial port where you programmer is found and the location of avr-dude.

Download it here: BT virginizer

++ Eee + Arduino + Processing = smaller installations :) Thanks Brian!

++ Tinkering exhibition in California. This is what originally inspired Massimo to call our company this way.

++ Last weekend Massimo spoke about Arduino at the Share: manufacturing conference in Turin.

++ Arduino gets name-checked by Ben Hughes Course Director of the Masters in Industrial Design course at Central St Martins.

Tinker is looking for an interaction / exhibition designer to work on a project based in Tucson Arizona. You have to have had practical experience with Arduino, be comfortable with Flash and know a little bit about either MaxMSP, Processing or VVVV etc… I think if you read this blog, you probably already do :)

See detailshere.

Get in touch if you’re interested!

(Warning, you HAVE to be based in the US for this and willing to relocate to Tucson Arizona… we think it’s a pretty nice gig that’ll be worth it :) )

Beer + stickers, who could ask for more?

Join me for the 7th edition of the monthly London-based pubmeet.

By popular demand, we’re now offering a Arduino + Flash workshop on April 5-6th 2008. Lead by Alias Cummins and assisted by Brock Croft, you will quickly cover the basics of getting your Arduino connected up and writing simple programs and finally getting Flash to talk to an integrated circuit via Arduino. All the while you will be approaching this from a Flash perspective, with our primary development language being ActionScript 3 and some AS2.

Tickets are £120 for professionals and £95 for students.

Sign up quick!

++ The Takeaway festival call for submissions is on.
“The Takeaway Festival dares to challenge accepted practices and offers a guiding hand to those who want to be able to find out how they can contribute to the silent revolution! Lo-tech or hi-tech, open-source or Takeaway has no preconceptions!”

Beware though, for students only!

++NetLab Connect is a collection of software and hardware components meant to make intertactive project easier to develop for designers.

++The RFID ecosystem project