That's it. I'm done.

It was my fastest three months and it took ages! I started plenty of things and finished none, just as planned. Progress? yes in all of the areas I was working on. Still, most significant thing was nothing planned. The project we started with Dan which seems to have a healthy kick-start and which will bring me back to UK and hopefully Dan to FIN.

I spent all my money, damaged most of brain cells and learned the art of gambling in a gentleman manner. Thank you England. God save the Queen and the Kleptones.


Epilogue:


Nice home coming, the airport was closed for a while for a heavy snow storm, my luggage was left in Brussels, our front door was frozen so tight that we broke the hinges when breaking in. When we got safely inside the storm cut the electricity several times. God I love Finland. Now I'll hibernate with some vintage red wine and quality delicatessen.

Pixels in the air

Some soothing success in serial radio communication. Our nice ready-made radio telemetry dongles work smoothly with the led matrix prototype. Now the display data is coming from the computer wirelessly in 9-byte bursts, the id and 8 bytes of the 8*8 matrix data. We can send quick cycles of unique data to be recognized and displayed by individual modules accordingly. Wireless link is reliable at least through a couple of walls.

Here the patterns are sent from Max/MSP in about one second cycles. The scrolling of the pattern is made in the Stamp. We are currently looking in to a Java "game engine" driving directly the set of modules or tiles as they will be.

Sending patterns manually:
changing matrix

Drawing the image and moving around with the module:
walking with matrix

Seaside

Fantastic weekend in the East Coast. We had a comfy cottage in Staithes, sleepy old fishing village between huge cliffs. When I'm totally useless old man (in a year or two), I'll move there and listen to the sea and keep a record of bypassing boats and time the variations in the tide.


Staithes


Runswick Bay, few miles down from Staithes
Thanks again, Dan, Lisa, Gav & Lucy!

Entering eighties

I'm approaching the technological knowledge where the rest of the world was 30 years ago. Keeping this pace I'll be able to create answering machine by year 2034. But self-made is always more precious. So I have been lied to.

nuke some popcorn and enjoy following feature films:
clip: chatman
clip: night chevron
clip: T.O.Y. the trilogy

SHIFTOUT Dpin, Clock, MSBFIRST, [d7219]

Finally received my 8*8 matrix chip integrated with the max7219 driver. After desperate bit-register shifting, which still is more black magic than science to me and after poking some pull-down resistors here and there, few boots, some very descriptive swearwords in finnish and I managed to get the space-invader to flicker on the screen before being killed by my most annoying self-shifting bit-register.

Cascadable 8 by 8 Dot Matrix LED

Pixxelpoint

Back from Pixxelpoint, Slovenia. Very nice trip for exhibiting Float, fantastic people, old friends and new ones. I finally met Tamas the second time and we could spend time with the work together. Gallery was big round white space, very big for the small town like Nova Gorica.



Slovenia is definitely on my list of places to spend more time, massive mountains, forests like in Finland, mediterranean climate, cheap refreshments, party people, what more can you ask? If something you can walk drive Italy to get it, walk actually from Nova Gorica.



www.pixxelpoint.org
High-five to Natasa, Dunja & Sonja once more!

New search-cam proto

Nice, small and most importantly wireless cam for the rotating camera proto. With wireless cam in this prototype solves most importantly the free rotation without any delicate connectors. Naturally with RF communication for the motor, this could be an independent module, which I don't need at this point.

Breadboard, my skateboard

Dear me. Two weeks from last entry. Time flies when you're busy apparently.

I have been working intensively with Dan on our tile-project. Since this is quite time consuming and not very visible work I have some trouble of documenting the process in this blog. I will publish more detailed demonstration when we have the first prototypes working.

Basically what we've been working with is simple wireless multinode serial communication with basic stamps and a pc. After some frustrated debugging due to a half-working rf-chip we finally have a working communication prototype where id-coded message comes from pc, gets transmitted to stamp, is recognized and the id-coded reply message is transmitted back and recognized in pc.

Once again I found myself questioning how deep in certain protocols should I be digging in. Now I stare the RS-232 specifications with my mouth full open, pondering what a hell I'm reading. I'm turning to a nerd. Yikes. Save me.

Perhaps breadboards will be totally cool in few years. I see trendsetters carrying hydrogen fuel-cell soldering irons and lighter sized pulse probes for instant hacking to public hardware. "Dude, where's my opto isolator?".

The Revenge of the Circuit Class.

Great outdoors

Chilly winter day in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It was snowing the previous night and all high hills were just white. So beautiful that it hurts my head. I need ugliness.