Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Home made B-52















Had prepared Kahlua at home earlier. I was wondering how difficult would it be to make a B-52 shooter at home. I found recipes for Kahlua as well as Bailey's Irish Cream online and so I took a shot (pun not intended) last night. This is what it looks like. I am supposed to use Grand Marnier on top but I will use Vodka in its absence. The current image actually shows scotch on top coz I was out of vodka then.
Lets see how does it work at the party tonight.

Happy new year to everyone!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

A Pro now!

Bought a Flickr Pro account today! Visit my photostream here.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Pixel Art
























Monday, November 23, 2009

This Sunday was a real hectic and productive one. I finally got a pending idea to work with a Freeduino board I acquired from the KHOJ workshop. Watch the video and continue reading after the jump.



The assembly uses a condenser mic, a single transistor amplifier, a Freeduino Lite board, a 9V battery and 5 LEDs. As you can see in the video, the lights turn on according to the intensity of the music/speech. The fun part is that it switches to a soothing ambient light mode when the music is turned down.
I got a sort-of-okay code working here. It is not fully optimized but it works.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Workshop @ KHOJ

It was a great experience being at the interactive design workshop hosted in KHOJ. Mr. Matt Kenyon was kind enough to teach a bunch of artists, architects, designers, students and enthusiasts about Processing and Arduino.
Though, it was originally supposed to work with Telepresence, using GPS smartphones; but the workshop did not achieve those goals. However, it was really amazing to meet people of all ages and backgrounds coming together and learning about this new revolution in the making.

For starters, Processing is a new and free programming environment designed specially for designers and artists. It is based on Java but it really simple to learn. The commands are simple, and the structure intuitive. Read all about it on the Processing website.
Arduino, started as a sister project along with Processing. It is the name of a circuit board which is easily programmable using a free programming environment very similar to Processing. People have done some amazing yet simple stuff with it. It is great for prototyping and installations. Read more here.

KHOJ ordered the Freeduino Lite (a simpler variant of Arduino) from Bhasha store, Pune. We had some problems setting them up as some of them were faulty while others had pin numbers mixed up. I used my Diecemillia and also helped a couple of people setting their boards up.
I was funny to see how Apple owners were ready with the boards minutes after they connected it; while Windows and Linux users struggled with myriad problems. USB to serial port issues, missing drivers, restarting systems, incompatible versions of things and what not!
Eventually, everyone got started and had their LEDs blinking. Everyone cooked up their ideas and I hope to see them pursuing those soon (including me). I hope to upload something soooon.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Last couple of days have been full of short-termed jobs at the office. I have been switching from one thing to another. Some Flash-based discussions with the interns, some quick layouts for the Safe-water project team and so on. For the last mentioned project, I got the opportunity to draw some scenarios as a visual aid for our team in the field. Whenever they face a situation where it is difficult to ask the right questions (primarily because of the language barrier between the Hindi and the Telugu speakers), pictures speak for us. Here is one of the scenarios I made:

The scenario is that the local source is spewing dirty water. The local doctor says that we/you should switch to drinking mineral water. The woman is a little angry on hearing this as mineral water is too expensive. The idea is to just state a situation and then let the respondents express their opinions.
I faced a challenge of making these drawings look 'native' to t
he target audience i.e. rural Andhra. I had some reference photographs from our team's previous visit to the place. I noted their dressing style, the water vessels they use, the kind of water sources they have etc etc. Feedback said that the drawings worked perfectly for them :)
I also had to draw some general products for another one of these exercises. Here they go:







































I really enjoyed making these simple line drawings. One of the joys is that they have a direct yet tough goal to achieve and that they have worked fine till now. I would love to keep drawing; though a change of subject is welcome.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Worked on getting the RC board to communicate with Arduino. Deductive logic did not work at its best here. I managed to switch a couple of LEDs on and off using the remote control; but the input from the board seems to 'change' after a while. I guess it has to do with the Italian and the Chinese ideology which went behind making the circuits.
Anyways I am determined to make them talk to each other despite of their cultural differences.
Will keep a note of latest happenings on that front here.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Bought this RC car on sunday; intending to pry it open and use with Arduino. Work has started, though only after office. Hopefully, I shall put up my creation here... soon.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Another day of tinkering with Arduino + LEDs, yielded the 9x9 grid and the entailing challenges.
The problem is to address any one of the nine units uniquely. As the rows and columns are connected, it is not possible to do so by a simple (x,y) address. To accomplish this task, we use what is known as POV (persistence of vision).
Each column (or row) is given a high voltage in a loop. While a particular column (or row) is active, the corresponding row (or column) can be addressed so as to light up the one or many desired LEDs in the current row (or column).
The code I wrote for Arduino is too messy to be shared but I am working on it. Here are two of the patterns I achieved.




Friday, January 02, 2009

A happy new year to all!
Whats a better way to start the year than playing with the Arduino board!
Thanks to Aparna and Maitreyee, I visited the electronic hobbyists' market in Chandni Chowk to buy some basic stuff (LEDs, breadboard, wires, soldering iron etc).
I started off with basic computer-board communication exercises. This is one of the things I tried – A 6 series LED chaser.