Interface of wireless router

It would be nice to have a better interface to a wireless router. In a seminar I heard someone had checked that, and they had checked in peoples home how they used the routers - they even hid them behind their radiators to get rid of them (with overheating as a problem). I'm not satisfied with my own either. It's there, taking up space and an electrical outlet.

It would also be much better to be able to control the elementary functions with switches instead of an interface. That way, you don't need network cables attached to be able to configure it. Maybe switches and buttons, and a little window displaying the wifi-password.

That contradicts the possible to hide it away, though...

Midicontrollerideas from Arduino seminar

http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Labs/MIDIOutput

A very easy way to implement MIDI with Arduino! Maybe I could build a pattern trigger for Ableton Live. It would look like a little matrix of buttons to make an analogue to the pattern trigger in Live.

This is mostly a copy of the Akai APC20, so it's probably cheaper to buy one, though-

What else can one do with a similar setup? Maybe a more probable patterntrigger? Something you could keep laying around on you desktop? Or put on your synthesizer or guitar? Something for loop-based performance?

Maybe something with servos? Or flexsensors?

The language hunt

To be able to express oneself in a good way, one need a good language. After reading Paul Grahams book "Hackers and Painters", I got quite overwhelmed by the idea about how a language should be to be good. He is talking about efficiency and endours Lisp, a quite theoretical but also quite pragmatic language. Even though it's very efficient in many ways, it has some severe losses, one of them is the libraries and coherent support for such things as threads.

I've been trying with the implementation Clojure a bit, but it's actually been a bit abstract so far. However, when I start programming Java, I feel restricted in some sence.

An intrestng speach by Rich Hickney, the creator of Clojure.

Ericsson, the famous telephone company, developed a language Erlang. Their main focus was reliability and "updateability", and that's really what you get. When most programs needs to be restarted, or, in the case of windows or mac os, often be rebooted, Erland can change the program while it's running. No downtime whatsoever.

http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/lang/erlang/about.html

Feedback-pan-test

And the day after, I tried it with pans (which was a possibility I found by systematicly exploring the design space of materials to build the lear-synthesizer with, everything from porcelain to tin foil was on that list).

A quite different result compared to my hand-test. It was hard to shape the resonance in the way needed to express different tones. The pans actually worked better for dub-delay-effect typed sounds, and was quite hard to be able to resonate in different tones, even tough I used a resonator. It was hard to "find" the tones.

It would be highly intressting to test it on some more appropiate form, a trumpet, for example.

The setup is that my built in microphone records the sound coming out of the loudspeakers, filters it, delays it because of latency and sends it out.

The chain is Mic->Saturator (distoritive amplifier) -> Resonator (narrow banded musical eq) -> Compressor with high ratio/limiter -> Speaker (mic)

Feedback-hand-test

I couldn't resist to test how the feedback could be handcontrolled. Starring: My hand, my computer and Ableton live 7.

It took some amount of time to able to choose between tones, the possibility to control the sound is rather limited with only the hand as reflector.

Phidgetmania

Dagens hacking var inte särskillt produktiv. Vi hittade först inte servo-controller-kortet, och letade desperat efter lösningar. Jonas anslöt sig till gruppen, så nu var vi fyra personer. Alldeles för många för att kunna göra arbete produktivt - det verkar nästan om att effektiviteten är omvänt proportionell mot antalet personer i gruppen.

Vi ville detektera närvaro, att en person var närvarande, och detta genom en trycksensor. Tyvärr var det omöjligt att processing att fungera med två olika phidgetkort anslutna, samtidigt som webkameran var igång. Programmet gav mycket svårdiagnogstiserade spårutskrifter, och krashade då och då. Vi förbannade java-threadsen, och jag undrar i mitt stilla sinne om det verkligen inte finns ett bättre sätt att programmera interaktion. Nåja, det var ett skissprogram, och fungerade som ett sådant.

Redovisningen gick väl ganska bra, men många andra hade nästan mer fantastifulla och fina prototyper, det var faktiskt mycket hög klass på dem.

Lärdomar

• Ha inte för stor grupp
• Boka undan det som behövs
• Använd inte för många sensorer/tekniker på en gång
• Använd Eclipse (kanske?) för bättre tillgång till olika bibliotek
• Planera för interaktionen och avsätt tid för att konfigurera den ordentligt

Det sista är väl att vi missade att faktiskt konfigurera interaktionen.

Jag ser mig om efter ett annat programmeringsspråk än Java, eftersom att jag tycker att det är för babbligt. Det tar många sidor kod att beskriva det man egentligen ville skriva på ett fåtal rader. Självklart går det ut över det färdiga resultatet. Kanske är Python bättre.

Brain wave sensors

Google: Brain wave sensor

gave some intresting results:

Brainwave Sensor Headsets Control Computers, Mobile Phones or Games using Thoughts & Emotions in Mind

"NeuroSky is a technology, reports MyTreo, that captures a person’s brainwave signals, eye movements, and other bio-signals via a patented Dry-Active sensor headset allowing users to control a computer or a mobile device with thoughts in the mind."

Brain wave sensor enables voiceless speech

"During a keynote presentation at the conference, Ambient’s Callahan demonstrated this technology by using the device to place the world’s first voiceless cellphone call to Mike Hames, a TI senior vice president. The Audeo can send information to a mobile phone using Bluetooth. The company has also successfully controlled a wheelchair without the need of physical movementagain using brain signals. Ambient expects its first product to enable speech for individuals with ALS will be available before the end of 2008. More information can be found at http://www.theaudeo.com."

Now that's cool.

Let's see what we can do with it. It would be awesome to be able to connect to someone in a "non-intrusiv way" and say hello to them. The sexual posibilities of this is not be underestimated. Porno industry have been very innovative. Very.