Planet Arduino

Arduino user SicLeung is part of Do Interactive, an interactive design team based in Hong Kong. He sent us a video about his experimental installation at Hong Kong Poly University – School of Design and exploring unusual ways of activating light:

Visual artist and filmmaker Tyler Tekatch worked with Kyle Duffield, interactive programmer to create an interactive video installation called Terrors of the breakfast table, currently on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada, until May 25 2014:

The visitor approaches a table and chair in the centre of the space, and blows into a sculptural device on the table, when the device glows orange. Subtle technologies sense the viewer’s breath, triggering thought-provoking interactive elements, such as a dream montage, the pace of a scene, the ambient sound, and the brightness of the visuals. The viewer discovers the interactions at their own pace, and some of the effects are more subtle than others.

They used a combination of cameras to shoot the project, including the Canon C100, the 5d markiii, and the Sony FS700 to achieve some of the super slow motion shots. The film was edited in FCP7, graded in DaVinci Resolve, and effects were done with Cinema 4d and 3ds Max.

For the interactive elements, they used Max 6 for all of the programming, including the Arduino library, AHarker Externals library, Ambisonics Externals from ICST, and externals from Jamoma. They experimented with a number of different approaches to the sensor, including sound analysis, but finally settled on an anemometer designed especially for breath by the company Modern Device.

The sensor was paired with an Arduino Uno,  to which they also added LEDs in order to illuminate the sensor housing sculpture, and which were also mapped to the viewer’s breathe.

Valcucine is making an open-call to select 10 individuals to participate in the 6-day event  during Salone del Mobile titled: The kitchen becomes OPEN! Scheduled from 6 to 11 April 2014 at Valcucine showroom in the heart of Milan, the workshop sees the participation of 10 designers selected following a call for ideas directed to planners, designers, makers, developers and programmers working in the field of design, as well as to students and enthusiasts at which time they will develop suggestions and new interactions in which to enhance the philosophies that have been employed in the realization of the Meccanica kitchen framework.

They will work alongside the dotdotdot design studio and team of experts. A set of meetings and debates are planned during the week which will be open to the public and to which important guests will be invited to share their knowledge, skill and experience: Massimo Menichinelli (open design facilitator), Enrico bassi (Fablab Torino coordinator, Stefano Maffei (professor at Politecnico Milano), Giulio Iacchetti (designer), Dario Buzzini (IDEO new york) and Zoe Romano (Digital Strategy and Wearables at Arduino).

The executable files of the project will be released in the open source mode, under the Creative Commons CC by–nc–sa license, with the permission to distribute, modify and create projects based on the original, except for business purposes, recognising the author’s paternity of the project.

The resulting projects will be exhibited from the evening of friday, April 11th at 6PM to sunday, April 13th, 2014.

Deadline call: 19 march 2014 - All the information regarding the competition and the workshop: demode.it/openkitchen

Space Replay is a project by Francesco Tacchini, a Royal College of Art grad student, and Julinka Ebhardt and Will Yates-Johnson of Design Products:

A hovering object that explores and manipulates transitional public spaces with particular acoustic properties. By constantly recording and replaying these ambient sounds, the levitating sphere produces a delayed echo of human activity.

It’s equipped with a battery-powered Arduino — an Adafruit Wave Shield  in order to record and playback audio on-the-fly through  a small speaker. In the video below you can see how it moves around:

It actually reminds me of Rover, the large white inflatable balloon protagonist  of  the 60s sci-fi series the Prisoner! What do you think?

Massimo Banzi shares things he wishes he knew when he was younger – By Ciara Byrne on FastcoLabs

The cofounder of the open source microcontroller Arduino, Massimo Banzi, doesn’t mince words. “Italy is the kind of a country where if you are young, you don’t exist,” he says. “It’s a country run by old farts.” Banzi decided not to accept the status quo.
Arduino was designed in Italy, by virtue of a foolish young Banzi on a quest for love. Today, Arduino is an enormously popular single-board microcontroller used to develop interactive objects.

The Power Of Love

Banzi’s career hasn’t followed a conventional path. “I was always interested in technology but I started using the Internet because I met this American girl when I was like 18,” he says. ”I wanted to write to her and the post would take three weeks. So I started using the Internet because I could email her. There wasn’t even a browser. And that became my career for several years. So every time I get a passion about something I try to do it on the side and it turns into my job. It’s also a curse also because you can never have a hobby.”
Banzi trained as a electrical engineer, but always had an interest in design. Ten years ago he was teaching interaction design at the now defunct Design Institute in Ivrea. Arduino started out as a tool to allow Banzi’s design students, most of whom has no technical background, to use technology in their projects.What do you think?

 The Arduino Legacy

Arduinos take inputs from a variety of switches and sensors and can control lights, motors, and other physical outputs.
Microcontrollers are used in all kinds of hacker projects: Musician Imogen Heap’s musical glove and fish on wheels. Banzi estimates that there are now 1.5 million Arduinos in the wild matched by a similar number of clones and variations on the original microcontroller.
Banzi, and therefore ultimately Arduino, was influenced by designers like Germany’s Dieter Rams and Italian Achille Castiglioni. “First of all (Castiglioni) said a designer should never take themselves too seriously so you should just really laugh. A lot of designers, they take themselves very seriously but their output is not as relevant as Castiglioni, who was always laughing and making jokes.” Arduino was actually named after a bar Banzi frequented.

Advice For Young Technologists

Banzi’s favorite Arduino projects these days come largely from the fashion industry. ”For us wearable is a lot about fashion,” he explains. “An Italian fashion designer made a corset that actually teaches you how to breathe properly. It measures the way you breathe with sensors and then kind of pushes you in different paths. Somebody else made clothing that can adjust your posture when you are using the computer.”

I asked Banzi what advice he would give to his 20-year old self. “Well, it would be mostly about self-confidence,” he said. “Arduino started off because I worked on a number of projects but I never had the will to just go ahead and run with something. I stopped caring about what other people thought or did and I just did my own thing. A number of people in the technology world they sort of insulted me and told me that I was an idiot and I thought ‘Okay, I might be onto something because of all these people telling me that I’m wrong.’“
Banzi is a big believer in following your own path. “When I was was 20 I was much more focused on having a career and following a path and staying with a sort of a system. At some point I stopped caring about that. I changed jobs. I had different experiences. In the end I started doing whatever felt good to me. There’s a friend of mine on Facebook from when I was 15, who is like one year old than me, and he’s followed this very corporate-type path and then I looked at a picture and he looks like he’s 60. So I think at least I kept a little bit younger than him. At least I did whatever I wanted. ”

A favorite of Banzi’s among the current generation of Arduino entrepreneurs is Josef Prusa. “Josef Prusa is a 22-year-old guy from the Czech Republic who is actually the designer of one of the most well-known open source 3-D printers,” he says. “He started off a teenager playing with Arduino and then he started to make a 3-D printer, started to make his own designs. No background in technology. He studied economics. So he dropped out of university because he was not matching what he was doing and he built up this little company and designed these 3-D printers.”
It’s clear that Banzi sees a little of himself in Prusa. “The biggest advice is that if you have to make a huge mistake do it because you decided so,” he concludes, “and not because you followed somebody else’s path. When I made big mistakes like everyone does, at least it was all my fault.”What do you think?

Originally posted on FastcoLabs

Creative Applications featured Timo Maas video showing a custom MIDI-controlled machine built by a creative team  including Daito Manabe:

‘Tantra’ is the new single from Timo Maas, taken from his latest artist album, ‘Lifer’. The video for the single, created by Daito Manabe, Motoi Ishibashi, Muryo Homma and Youichi Sakamoto (rhizomatiks) includes a machine that uses Arduino controlled ball dispensers, motorised rotating steel plates and LED lights to create a nexus between electronic music and a sound responsive mechanical object.

New Yorker‘s cartoon

Leyla is an interactive Niqab that reveals facials expressions on textile recreating the movement of facial muscles involved in smile and frown. The project was created by Patrizia Sciglitano and sent to us through our blog submission form. We got in touch with her to know more about it.

How come you started working at this project?

I started my BA graduation project in February 2012. I’m not Muslim but I’ve always lived in environment influenced by Islamic culture and I’ve been fascinated by it. Some months ago I participated to  a workshop in Prato about Wearable Technology with Riccardo Marchesi of Plug&Wear and I started to understand this new technology and to have real answers to my questions.

How does it work?
Leyla’s circuit is composed by two facial-muscle sensors detecting micro-facial movements. The Arduino Lilypad receives data from them and sends the processed information to the Nitinol wires (muscle wires)  that are sewn into the fabric,  creating curls of the expressions hidden under the veil.

Have you got yet any reactions from girls wearing the veil?

I kept working on my research project while attending an association for non-EU women in my city, organized by a Muslim friend of mine since childhood. I met several women there, both young and old who’ve helped me understanding better their culture.  I explained the project to them and from the very first concept ideas I received a positive feedback.
Not very often designers create accessories suited for their necessities and thorough this object they could gain more “emotional communication” capabilities while maintaining their decency and this new opportunity  made them very happy.
They were both intrigued by the new technology I showed them (muscle Wires), and on how I was materializing my new idea of communication. Muslim women thought that my idea was very cool. It was a chance to give voice to a new way of communicating their emotions without needing to “undress”.

Until now I haven’t had the chance to test “Leyla” in Saudi Arabia, although I would love to do it in the future. Thanks to a friend of mine, however, I had the chance to show “Leyla” to some women wearing the Niqab staying in Istanbul for Erasmus program: they even asked me if I was selling it!

——

In the video and picture below you can see  the result, from left to right: Relaxed muscle – Contracted muscle: smile – Relaxed muscle – Contracted muscle: anger.

Arduino Facebook  page is a great source of inspiration  with plenty of people posting everyday about projects and experiments. Some days ago a user shared this interesting video about Magnetography, an alternative drawing toy using ferrofluid, a liquid which becomes strongly magnetized in the presence of a magnetic field.

Magnetography, by Christian Robach, is built out of old DC-Motors, a frame filled with water and ferrofluids.  The “pen” can be controlled by using the W-A-S-D letters on the keyboard allowing the users to play with the liquid metal without getting their hands dirty.
The commands are sent to the serial Port via Processing then Arduino UNO, with an Adafruit Motor Shield extension, reacts by powering the motors and moving the magnet according to the coordinates. Enjoy the video below:

Arduino Facebook  page is a great source of inspiration  with plenty of people posting everyday about projects and experiments. Some days ago a user shared this interesting video about Magnetography, an alternative drawing toy using ferrofluid, a liquid which becomes strongly magnetized in the presence of a magnetic field.

Magnetography, by Christian Robach, is built out of old DC-Motors, a frame filled with water and ferrofluids.  The “pen” can be controlled by using the W-A-S-D letters on the keyboard allowing the users to play with the liquid metal without getting their hands dirty.
The commands are sent to the serial Port via Processing then Arduino UNO, with an Adafruit Motor Shield extension, reacts by powering the motors and moving the magnet according to the coordinates. Enjoy the video below: