Testing, Testing!

Everything has finally come together and our ideas have been realised with new technology. Well

HA-ZAAA it works! Have a look at the high quality video below of our project being tested on campus. As you can see from the video below our project works perfectly, and will work in the same way in stonehouse although the light source will be the traffic light.

So then you can see the light trigger the hacked fart machine, the ardunio picking up this sound, outputting a 1 or a 0, flash picks up when a 1 is outputted and runs our animation displaying the RSS feed from the internet. So enjoy our test video!

iDAT209 - Controversial projection for the Dance Academy Building, Stonehouse, Plymouth, Devon, UK from Luke Mears on Vimeo.

A job well done!

SO then the time has come to finalise and test our project. To review....

Input: Traffic light - Light sensor.

Process: fart machine - sound sensor- ardunio board 

Output: computer - RSS - projector

So as mentioned we are going to use the RSS feed to display information in stonehouse. Taking the latest post's on the RSS feed on the herald website, for reasons mentioned in previous post's.

Ideas:

Flash animation
1. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Moving text
2. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Subtle message
3. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   opening curtains

Based on the time that the public are waiting at the red traffic light we know that the animation has to be relatively short but yet send a message that's memorable.  Yet if we just have standard static text the public wont be drawn to our project. Although we know that the RSS feed is going to be imported into our flash animation live! So any new post will be on our animation, therefore displaying several bits of information very quickly, in sort of a subliminal fashion, controversial?

We also have the idea of having red theatre curtains starting and ending the animation was suggested. Not only will this be a moving animation that will hold the users attention but it also will also tread water in the historic part of the Dance Academy. Something which we had dismissed previously, which is nice because now we are exploring the realms of modern and old history within stonehouse. By applying this I think our target audience now applies to all ages and people from every demographic, after all voyeurism is embedded in human nature.

So Luke used his Flash skills and put together an animation with all the specification in mind.

As you can see in the image below, the RSS has been successfully imported and ready to use in our animation. However we are also going to add our own message to the animation to make it A. send a controversial message and B. extend peoples thoughts whilst exploring the space of stonehouse.

ks to http://pixel13.lukemears.com/ for the image!

Group photo

The back of the project has been broken, our input has been decided, the communication side of things had been worked out and work had started on processing. So no we were using code of a diffrent formatt. Us idat students have been used to code of a certain ariet, this arduino/processing lark was very different, Its designed for artists which we are i suppose. 

However it seemed to go pretty swimmingly and we got on with the code straight away. What we struggled with from the offset is how to get flash to pick up the fact that the traffic light is red or not. Ardunio outputs 1 , or a 0 depending on the sound sensors/light sensors state. So we obviously need to get flash to register that somehow! Also we obviously need to import the RSS feed for use in our animation.

The setup:

The sketch:

Next it was time to start work on the actual projection!

The hard part for some.

So whilst in New York City! With the IDAT crew, jon was busy at home hacking away.(My heart goes out to you)

We now had a way to detect the traffic light turning red via arduino. However a problem had reared its ugly head.

The Problem

 Because we are now using arduino we had to find a way to communicate with the projector.

Option A. Have a wired connection. Option B. Have a wireless connection.

Option A is clearly going to require wires leading over the road and to be honest looks untidy and its very easy to see for any member of the public how its working, what a bore!

Option B presents a challenge of wirelessly communicating the Light sensor on the arduino board with the projector! 

Well we do like a challenge us IDAT lot.

So using arduino parts its easy enough to communicate wirelessly, however the parts reach up to £50 in price and well we are students! So we found out how to use a method that was cheap and provided wireless technology.

A fart machine!?

 Yes a fart machine. Via a very simpel form of toy hacking we can use a £10 fart machine in our project for more examples of it visit ‘tinker.it’ . So Jon did a sterling job of hacking a simple toy fart machine so that instead of having a button to activate the sound, a light sensor would replace it. Yet it still worked in the same way, the wireless connection between the remote was the same but now a light sensor activated the sound as opposed to a button. I think we may have discovered cheap wireless! We would then use the sound made to set off the projection. Basically Traffic light > light sensor > fart machine > sound sensor > computer > projector.

 

 And here's a video to show it working....

So a little change, the fart machines newly hacked remote would sit inside the traffic light so that when the light comes on, it will set the fart machine off wirelessly and now the ardunio board will sense the sound and when it does it will communicate with our flash animation.

Amazing Arduino!

Wow so i literally spent a good hour maybe more on youtube looking at examples of arduino uses, and its AMAZING!

I was so impressed with the potential and power of something so small cheap and relatively simple. Most uses of course are for sheer fun and art but the ideas behind them are from intelligent minds!

Take this video for an E.G.

I love this piece! Taking something like speech and visualising it in a modern aesthetic and displaying it on a table! wow! Im really keen on this and hope to gain a much further insight. For now we as a group are keeping it simple with light sensors using and LDR( Light Dependant Resistor).

The amazing world of Audino.

So our ideas have all fallen in to place. Were happy with what we want to achieve and are ready to get down to business.

Until recently none of us had really a strong idea about how we were going to tackle what seems now an easy task but that's thanks to Lee Nutbean.

So our first challenge was to work out how we would pick up the traffic light transition to red. At this point we were introduced to arduino.

Arduino  

"Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments."

Over the course of the last few weeks we've been toying about with arduino, processing and general errrm stuff. I had never seen this technology before on a hands on basis and was really keen to get to grips with it. What made it so fascinating is that all code designed for anything arduino is open source! Ideas being shared on a global scale, lovely! So a lot of inspiration was available quickly and easily. As you can see from this video some really cool things can be done.....

How do they work?

Put simply, Arduino boards do what they are told. Using processing/Arduino which is freely available on the web, users can programme a set of instructions and upload them to the boards. Users can set the code to be run automatically but what makes these boards a cool subject is that light/sound pretty much any sensor can be applied to them. So now we knew what we would be using to detect the traffic light turning red!

Now we have arudino technology geing used in our project which is not only a useful technology it is also cost effective. Now we had to think of a way of producing a cheap wireless communication between the light sensor/Arduino board to the laptop/computer we are going to use to show our Flash projection on the Dance Academy.

Twitter.

Twitter is obviously a social craze, one of which all us IDAT'ers have jumped on board with.
Its easy enough to put a simple twitter widget into your website but im not happy with that.

Ive decided that im going to use my uber flash skillz ( which arent so uber) to make my own widget.

Not an amazing idea, but its going that extra step.

Blood, Sweat and Photoshop.

I wasn't happy at all with the pure beginner standard of my website. Not impressive at all. So once again i set out to redesign the whole site, with a more web 2.0 aesthetic, but while keeping the same colour scheme.

So here it is...Ta daaaaa

.

The sidebar has greatly been improved visually.
The website as a whole has a more pleasing user experience now.
I think headers are too bulky so i got rid of it and designed a new logo to replace a bulky mess.

Im still working on roll-overs, and i have a problem that when i zoom out the background moves away from the content, this being due to the background being a JPEG. Probably a simple solution, one which ill find :).

How we got this far

Our plan is a happy plan. Meaning we are happy with it.

We've gone from idea to idea and finally settled on what we want to do, but the main aim has always been to send a message that circles the idea of how controversial buildings such as our one have been in the space of stonehouse.

Over the past few lectures we've also been discussing what technologies we are going to incorporate into our project meaning how we are actually going to make our design work.

So a brief run-down...

How are we going to use data?

Using RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.- wikipedia)

So here's a small layout of our plan....

1. 
   
    Traffic light turns red
2. 
   
   Light sensor picks up this action
3. 
   
   wirelessly communicates with processing/audino
4. 
   
   Displays RSS feed until red light changes.
5. 
   
   RSS feed will be incorporated into a flash animation.
6. 
   
   Flash animation ends when traffic light turns from red to orange.

RSS in general is for me a piece of coding genius. Such a simple idea and integrates into browsers so well, but what made RSS so appealing is the constant updating of any given feed. Take BBC news, each headline is posted into the feed for any reader to see quickly and easily. So as luck would have it the dance academy building has its own feed here http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/danceacademy via the herald.

Even though its not updated daily perhaps even weekly, if it was it would provide a different experience for the public.

So we plan to project this feed in a way in which the public who see it talk about it afterwards. Perhaps simplicity could be the way forward with this?

So now we know what information we want displaying and how we want it to work. The next step is to figure out how we will do it.

Back to buisness!

Our project is now developing and evolving into something I think we as a group are all going to be proud of. In relation to previous post's our concept for the project has changed significantly.

We moved on from the Mise en Abyme effect because, while it did look cool we weren't sure how to incorporate it into our project with significant meaning. We also decided that we were going to use skills we actually had as opposed to ones we didn't HA! So we've thought about having a flash based projection involved in our work.

Next, ideas circling the history of the building also began to fade due to lack of ideas. Its also a subject we think that many of the Plymouth people may know about but aren't so up to date on recent news involving the Academy's closure etc.

Therefore we focused on the more recent state of the building as a nightclub "the Dance Academy". Drugs dancing and crime are three topics that spring to mind when the Dance Academy is mentioned so our visualisation via the projector was going to incorporate this, very controversial but yet it may send a message to the public and hopefully council, kind of what were aiming for.

Instead of having a boring and perhaps tacky looking questionnaire on a website built by us, we've decided to use RSS feeds. So we intend to use the data from an RSS feed that relates to Union Street or better yet the dance academy and project it onto the chosen location which is now point B on the map in a previous post. This location has been chosen because we want our main audience (The people driving through) to see it, so we are going to have our entire project somehow be activated by the traffic lights at the pedestrian crossing right in front of dance academy.

We want the effect that hopefully people in the cars will create a mini traffic jam due to focusing on our projection in Stonehouse. Therefore publicising our work via word of mouth instead of us trying to promote a website with a questionnaire used for data they probably don't care about. This way it happens automatically without anyone's input.

We think this is a much better approach of A. incorporating contemporary technology formats, and B. making people stop and stare, and being as that's what we are trying to achieve it makes sense.

So then....

OUR IDEA IN A BUBBLE !

1. Taffic light at crossing turns red

2. 
   
   RSS feed is displayed.

Sounds simple, ahhh well no. Many technologies have to be incorporated to make this work, and we must choose which ones will work best, whilst bearing in mind cost and practicality. However hopefully its going to look something like this...

-

( courtesy of www.pixel13.lukemears.com)

Design update

So i went ahead and changed the website logo to match the twitter layout. Looks much better and more coherent. Also my header now doesn't use the reapeat-x function in the CSS file. Instead my header is now a singular .PNG file. Much better.

The design falls into place

www.busy-signal.co.uk 2.0!!

Check the new design yo, nothing amazing or even that special but ive got a colour scheme that a like and think works. The header will need more work it doesn't exactly fit, in fact after taking this very screen shot its easy to see that the logo needs an entire rework but still a vast improvement from how busy signal 1.0 looked.

As for the code itself, using twitters website ive incorporated my latest tweets into the sidebar of all my pages.

The script....

<script>
new TWTR.Widget({
  version: 2,
  type: 'profile',
  rpp: 6,
  interval: 6000,
  width: 250,
  height: 300,
  theme: {
    shell: {
      background: '#1590ce',
      color: '#fafafa'
    },
    tweets: {
      background: '#151a4d',
      color: '#f704ff',
      links: '#1590ce'
    }
  },
  features: {
    scrollbar: true,
    loop: false,
    live: false,
    hashtags: true,
    timestamp: true,
    avatars: true,
    behavior: 'all'
  }
}).render().setUser('busysuk').start();
</script>

Im in the process of converting my blog to Wordpress so that should be on the website very soon. stay tuned....