Mon, 18 Feb 2008
Hardware Into Art: TVIC/Geekosystem Crossover
What will this become?
Come to The Valley in Christchurch this week (Tuesday!) and don't just find out, make IT/ART happen!
Here's some of the details, check out the event announcement for more details:
The Valley In Christchurch February dinner and hack events
When: 6:00pm Tuesday 19th February 2008
Where: The China Kitchen, on Hereford St, opposite the Flight Centre
And then join us post-dinner for a special TVIC-exclusive Geekosystem session:
When: ~7:00pm—10:00pm-ish
Where: The Physics Room, Second Floor, 209 Tuam Street, Christchurch
Rumour is that some pizza and beverages will be provided while you work on your hardware hacking masterpiece.
Thanks to Adam and the Physics Room for organising this special after-hours session for us!
The photo above (courtesy of Adam Hyde) shows some of the "raw materials" that will be on hand.
Tending Networks: The 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium
As it happens, the Geekosystem coincides with the The 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium produced by The ADA Digital Arts Network.
Self-described as "New Zealand/Aotearoa's only digital artists' network. ADA was born of the observation that although new media artists were often highly networked in terms of both their own practice and their professional relationships, there was no national organization drawing together those with a common interest in digital art."
The symposium is an opportunity for New Zealand's digital/new media artists to meet face to face. Check out the upcoming weekend's programme.
I've actually been invited to present a brief overview of some of my Arduino hacking to the group during their "lightning talk" session on Saturday afternoon. A pleasant parallel to the symposium topic is my most recent project has been an ethernet expansion shield for the Arduino. I must write some more on that.
Foo Fruition
Speaking of needing to write more... My presentation at the ADA Symposium and the TVIC/Geekosystem crossover are a direct result of my attendence earlier this month at Kiwi Foo Camp 2008 (a.k.a. Baa Camp) and some people I met there. I must write some more on that. :-)
Posted at: 06:12 | category: / | | Comments ()
Thu, 10 Jan 2008
Summer hacking
Last week I caught up with Marek and the elusive Phillip (finally!) and showed off my Arduino connecting to IRC:
It turned out jandals and shorts weren't actually the best wear for the weather on the day but still good to catch up.
Posted at: 11:10 | category: / | | Comments ()
Wed, 31 Oct 2007
Gratuitous Update
In a transparent attempt to not leave the month of October blog entry-free here's a quick and gratuitous update.
One-way wiki
As noted back in July, I've been running a personal "one-way wiki" as an experiment. My primary goal was to get more of my in-progress hacks off my harddrive and onto the public net where they might be of more use to someone. The secondary goal was to try to reduce the number of browser tabs I had open and chewing up memory.
Overall I think the experiment has been a success with a (very) rough count of about ten-thousand words over about thirty pages in the wiki. While many of those words are only links there's a few in-progress projects partially documented also.
I still probably have more tabs open than I'd like but I think I'm making progress on that front.
The wiki has definitely been a plus for documenting in-progress projects and keeping track of details for recovering from context switches. Hopefully the notes—such as they are—are of use to others as well.
I think the only down-side is that my blogging activity has become even more curtailed than it was—mainly because I'm documenting items in the wiki rather than on the blog. It is entirely possible of course that I wouldn't have posted anything more to this blog even if if I hadn't had the wiki. In light of this however (and a couple of requests in this direction) I'm thinking of generating blog entries from the "recent changes" record of the wiki so people who are interested can still keep track of what I'm up to. When or if this idea actually gets implemented remains to be seen. :-)
Recent changes
In the interim here's a few links into the wiki:
- Most of my recent projects have focused on the Arduino hardware platform. I've been working on interfacing an I/O expander and ethernet module with success. You can check out my Arduino interfacing demonstration videos too.
- A growing list of links on various electronics topics including PCB-making, DIY test equipment and tutorials.
- Some notes on using the open source elecrtonic design software package KiCad on Mac OS X.
- I also created a set of electronic breadboard templates in SVG, PNG and PDF formats. That page even got featured on the Makezine blog.
- Finally for now, an in-progress project to reverse engineer the Skannerz Racerz hand-held link-able toy racing game. This project has also made use of the xoscope sound-card oscilloscope software package.
Posted at: 23:20 | category: / | | Comments ()