All posts tagged Arduino
Laser Cutters and Circuit Boards
Lately we’ve been looking at the Arduino, an open source microcontroller which enables interactive designs. As we delve further into open-sourced electronics, we’ll get the chance to create custom circuit boards. And while Fritzing is a great site for helping with this, laser cutting a circuit board in house would not only be awesome, but would also save time and money.
Tangible User Interfaces
Here’s an early look at the tangible user interface with Grasshopper. In this video, we’re using the Reactivision Listener for Firefly (a plugin for Grasshopper). While the video represents one basic model, we can use hundreds of these tags (called fiduciary markers) to represent building masses or program blocks. By plugging a physical model into Grasshopper, we now have access to a wide range of tools for simulation, visualization, and geometric generation. Each scheme can be saved with a simple toggle and studied further.
Lecture: Firefly Experiments
For those of you in the Seattle area, Jason Kelly Johnson of Future Cities Lab in San Francisco will be at the University of Washington for a lunch-time lecture to demo Firefly and show recent projects produced by his lab. Firefly is a software bridge between Grasshopper and the Arduino micro-controller, the internet and a number of other Human Interface devices. It allows near real-time data flow between the 3D digital and physical worlds, and will read/write data to/from internet feeds, remote sensors, connect with machine vision protocols, etc. We have been toying around with Firefly here at LMN and having a lot of fun. Jason Kelly Johnson’s introduction should serve as a great overview of the software and where it’s going.
Stage Lighting with LEDs, Arduino, & Firefly
We used 10 high-intensity LEDs to light a 1:24 scale model of a studio theater. The LEDs were wired to an Arduino micro-controller and programmed using the Firefly components for Grasshopper. All 10 LEDs can be individually controlled from a Grasshopper definition or wired together (in GH) to form banks of lights. The result is a computer-controlled mini theatrical lighting system on the cheap.