tziteras

A recap

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:42:53 PST

Here is a quick recap since it's been a while I've written here (I've written a bit on my blog in n-1.cc though).

When the spanish protest camps made their decision to shift focus from camps to assemblies in each neighbourhood, back in June, I started going to my local commission meetings. It was a brilliant experience, to sit with other spaniards and see what we actually wanted to implement from our experience of the camp. I took part in the culture group and talked about participative art, and how you can use flashmobs and quite innocent actions to get people involved, or at least questioning things. We organised a cabaret where we brought together lots of local people for a memorable performance in our local square. This was in Sant Andreu del Palomar. I've since moved to the city centre, so am too far away, but I have about 4 different assemblies to choose from here, and getting energy to get stuck in a bit more.

Sant Andreu in Barcelona is an area with small streets and old and beautiful mediterranean houses a bit like Gracia, but without the drunken tourists. It was a bastion of resistance to franco, and before then, one day in 36 it was the area where thousands of rifles were siezed by local anarchists - contributing massively to their short but inspiring time of self organised local democracy. One assembly participant said the soldiers there had left their bullets in a different warehouse across the yard so they couldn't shoot them! Another described the taking of plaza catalunya back then, as told by grandparents - that the fascist soldiers were expecting the civil guard to be on their side, but they weren't - and they didn't have a chance, and he showed me which way everyone had gone. Back to this century - we then organised an end-of-summer "university" with the Universitat Indignada, which led to me talking about Transition Initiatives together with Antonio Scotti of Barcelona en Transició to a full square, and showing In Transition. Somehow there were also 3 other Peak Oil related talks, one of which was Martí Olivella, doing the rounds with his own version of Transition - applied in his case to politics. Soon after, we started an urban garden project with a lot of enthusiasm from pretty much everyone who passed: someone asked - "when do you meet? Every Monday?" "I don't know it's our first time, but okay!" and they are still at it...

With all the other members of Barcelona en Transicio, this cultural revolution that was the 15-m protest movement emerging from the squares, really got us energised, as people were now asking real questions, not just about the economy but about the earth, and family and the future. I just got the news the other day that 400 people have signed up, in a village out in the countryside, to support a politically oriented version of the Transition Towns recipe, pioneered by one of the speakers at our Uni Indignada: Marti Olivella, and an enormous stretch of land once used by Coca Cola is now to be proposed as a project to the local city council for food growing projects, and of course there is Calafou - the post-capitalist experimental factory space outside Barcelona, by the fantastic Montserrat Mountains. In Calafou, there is a hackerspace and a brewery project, as well as many smaller workshop spaces and living spaces - all closely linked with local assemblies so as to provide an alternative system in which to start to inhabit, and slowly stop being so dependent on what are now very fragile and unequal societies.

The hackerspace for now is inhabited by Lorea developers, the creators and maintainers of the 15-M's own ELGG based social network (but federated, secure, private, collaborative, and task/collab oriented) - N-1.cc.

Of course I played a lot of gigs for fundraisers, and got out a lot of old chilean Nueva Trova songs that I'd not played for years, but somehow fit the times again....

Now that the Occupy movement has joined in this incredible form of protest and reinvention that began for us back in May, things are really starting to change on a global level. I expect the governments and powers that be might even make some token concessions at this point, to try and get everyone christmas shopping.

The occupy movement has inspired a huge amount of creative, projects that work across disciplines in modern culture creating international IRC networks, teamspeak meetings, physical journeys or meetings. Some of these projects and initiatives start to build a symbiotic rather than parasitic kind of technological and social system around us. Now we are dominated by algorithms that determine all the decisions for us.

And then, there's the urgent problems around. Who am I to say anything, but this is meant to be a global movement for democracy so here is my suggestion: http://pastebin.com/xz6kZ3HS

It's a plan for a way to do a global people's meeting, like a giant physical and virtual assembly where we all, the people of this earth, as a one off, meet, and decide once and for all the future of the planet and what we are going to do about it. Think of it as a people's Bretton Woods, without the bickering. There are lots of smaller regional initiatives going on, but it's hard to organise larger get togethers, but we can start to think of distributed ways for it to happen, although I first thought of it as a time constrained thing, where we were all at it simultaneously.

Here is the piratepad where we're working on more of it. Feel free to contact me and join in. One of the things about it is that it needs skills that are already there around us, and abilities that are pretty widespread already. I really hope something like this can happen.

If there was such a global meeting, I would take my non-crazy robot idea there. (see next post!)

Ban Robot Violence

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:47:10 PST

[IN PROGRESS - need to add links. Sorry but I'm into participative process, please comment and help me write this! I was just thinking about this thing about robots - online or physical, or more tentacular cybernetic systems like what international corporations and/or tech companies have built up around us over the years and how it interacts with us. I felt I should come and write it down.]

There is terrible totalitarian news starting to edge it's way in to passive acceptance, from the government injustice and brutality across the world, and the international coordination of this violence (that goes all the way to the top), from that to the drones that patrol prisons and are made to kill people.

I've spent a little time working with electronics, making and conceiving of materials to make a symbiotic musical, solar, improviser bot, and programming software based bots to guide kids around a 3D reconstruction of Sydenham Crystal Palace in London (and Second Life). I learnt that through the years, robots have been acquiring the basic ability not only to be a bit overly specialised towards human interaction, but to carry out all the functions required to be considered alive, even when some of those functions are made through their relationship with us. In the case of killer or surveillance drones, their creators, the teams of scientists who work in places like and are completely insane, as are the structures who made them exist. And I wonder how many of them believe in a creator god.

There's one thing they probably don't want us to realise: We the people are the creators of robots. Everyone can join in by learning a bit of programming and electronics, and a huge DIY scene is still around making UAVs or just robots of all kinds, just from open designs - recently to film a protest.

We invented robots. Nowadays the killer robots aren't that autonomous, but they are getting there. They can mimic human behaviour in loads of ways already, but they shouldn't have to, as they are completely wonderful things, if you think that they can be made from just about anything. But soon, this intelligence, but also growth in availability of sensors and software libraries for interpreting them, so a robot will do as told and travel autonomously to kill selected people without much need for a human "pilot".

But robots shouldn't be made to do these horrible insane things. They come from our invention, from all our wonderful science that's supposedly so opposed to judeochristian religion, but that is the same white boys club, who deep down wouldn't mind a go as all powerful creator gods too. To want to not only kill you but create a robot but make it kill you more efficiently than a human in a plane or helicopter could, is psychopathic, and all the people involved in doing this should be tried for international war crimes and put under care and long term psychoanalysis for psychotic disorders. In the end though, the system as usual is to blame.

We know that it's going to be a huge crisis here on earth, with the euro falling apart and banks crashing any minute, no new fuels in sight and an environmental catastrophe after another. Some fear we really might not make it through as a human race in the slightly longer term, which has most other species sighing with relief! So if that's even a remote possibility, I imagine how the people in these companies and government departments react to that thought, wondering what their legacy might be.

Our robot brethren are whatever we make them, and we can get them not only to survive us , but be positive creatures. Maybe they will be merciless killers like in a space blockbuster, but maybe they can be ethical, positive things too, and I realise this must come from popular demand, not passive acceptance of these trends.

So I propose a ban NOW on robot violence. No robot shall ever be made, or forced to be violent to people. We owe it to them as their creator gods. And just as non-crazy people. Thank you.

Is peaceful cohabitation with self organisers possible?

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Sun, 22 May 2011 05:37:24 PDT

My predictions for Spain are pretty bleak at the moment, although I have some hope. I predict the right wing Partido Popular, founded by a member of Fascist dictator Franco's government, will win these elections.

The PP will have none of the PSOE's qualms in dislodging the protestors once results are in. There will be some trouble with police and law in order to empty the squares, and for some time, things will return to normal.

These are beautiful protests – more a spontaneous group of people just expressing discontent, and trying to find alternatives to the way things are. They now reach 300 cities and towns where people are camped in the main squares, and the evening "caceroladas" (some sonic discontent making at 9pm with cans and pots) reach every street in Barcelona.

I think the camp's future is uncertain at the moment, but that a movement may have been born, a movement that will oppose or maybe even cohabit with the old order in new creative ways.

"teach noam chomsky in schools"

And then in the longer term there's the upcoming financial crash.

Anarchists have been targeted in Greece by police violence, maybe because they are one of the main groups organising protests and actions. There are also lots of groups here organising more for bottom up resistance to cuts: decreiximent is the main eco centred group coming up with interesting ideas, and there is a local cooperative with far reaching aims, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana. But then there are also people involved in various movements which have joined the streets at different moments in recent times and the demoralised unions. A lot of the anger needs a positive direction and there is a lot to be done. The cuts are due to the need to pay back a huge EU loan, and the anarchist black blocks make up a lot of the violent elements at protests. But fighting policemen doesn't help people make bonds.

The problem with this: Spain is getting close to a debt situation like Portugal, which yesterday received a bailout from the IMF's sexy purse. But that money is running out, and if Spain and Italy join the queue, the EU could suffer tremendously. What happens when Italy and Spain both go for that last bit of money is all unclear at the moment.

This is having strong effects on day to day life in Spain. In the Plaza Catalunya Acampada on Friday, a woman told the crowd at one of the spontaneous assemblies of seated people, happening in various places around the square, on a loudspeaker that her wing had been closed after 30 years of work there, but that it had been opened again so that a minister could have his pacemaker put in, before closing up again.At 9pm the "cacerolada" started - a loud banging of pots and pans and lots of shouting. It was beautiful to see the call rise and everything start, like a symphony taking off. The next day I was on my little streets away from the centre, and the cacerolada started - in some streets a lone beater in some window, banging on a pan, and in other streets whole families out with all their kids banging pans and talking to people about why they were doing it.

Cacerolada Acampada Barcelona Miercoles 19 by alefernandez

Services are being cut meanwhile, and some things are starting to fall apart. Getting work is a bad joke when 100 people apply for a single position within a day, so that finding work becomes an exercise in becoming meat for the short term money so that everything can keep working badly in the contracting companies the employment agencies find workers for. In Greece, this has reached the level of mass hunger strikes of immigrants, general strikes and some areas organising direct action and sabotage, blocking roads and taking action. Here, an attempt last winter to occupy an abandoned cinema and use it as an information centre, was quickly and brutally evicted by police.

The disintegration of the social structures people once relied on is slowly progressing, as housing agencies, local shops and larger business alike fall apart from one day to the next. Financial meltdowns are nothing new in Spain, often at huge social costs.

A "post capitalist baby" at plaza catalunya. "Help us grow - we are in an embryonic phase".

Anarchism offers lots of ways (there is probably a different version of anarchism for each anarchist there is) to self organise in participative ways and keep things going in some way when government services collapse. I believe these people protesting should use their remaining time in the square finding out how to make the assembly permanent and functional. Through virtual spaces and perhaps the use of empty shops and spaces.

The best action you can take is action to protect and provide help to your own area, because the politicians can't argue with the fact that they have ceased to provide important services. Cooperative spaces can begin to fill these spaces, and volunteers can do a lot with their cognitive surplus.

The workers who run those government services just have to agree to open the place up, find out what is needed to make it running and get to work again - a method described in "La Toma" - about the worker's takeover of abandoned factories in the financial crash in Argentina at the beginning of the century. It's also been shown that anarchism reaches a certain level of efficiency that is higher than that of the state, once the cost of maintaining a functioning government becomes too high for it to function properly. This is very much what happened when the republic fell in 1936 and people just stuck in and organised themselves to take over. This kind of popular democracy might not be possible today in the way it was then, but it's important not to forget that these experiments tend to be crushed by both right and left wing sides, as they show that the whole establishment of a modern government or a nation as state might actually not be the best or the only way to run things.

During the time when most businesses were collectivised and run by cooperatives in the 1930s, in the Catalunya and Aragon provinces, where I happen to live, self organisation reached a huge level, and apparently not through any particular influence from anarchist groups.

From what I see in this film or from Homage to Catalonia, this was spontaneous bottom up organisation much like what is happening now in squares across Spain. Here is "land and freedom" by mike leigh, hoping that's a good video playlist for these times.

It is much easier to step in when there is no one to oppose you, but as a government slowly loses money and stops functioning, it is hard for collaborative groups to step in, like the people self organising in squares across Spain today.

Yesterday the Environment office (tent) from the local Acampada Barcelona - the people camped out in Plaza Catalunya in the centre of Barcelona, joined up with Barcelona en Transicio, whilst welcoming many other local groups to come and share what they have been trying to do in response to the ecological and financial situation with the people in the square. There are also calls going out to lots of other groups around the world for solidarity with the protesters. I'm trying to get a few translations of their call now in various languages! A lot of the difference between the Transition movement and anarchist groups, which are frequently much greener and have been going much longer, is that transition groups actively seek funding and work together with lot of organisations, including local government.

Nowadays though most anarchists would never collaborate with a government in co-governing. But collaboration is known to have a certain efficiency in living systems in general, and I think it deserves a look, and a decent attempt at making it work alongside government. How to get government to accept a bit of self rule in the interest of stability? I think it needs to happen with a lot of smiles and friendly gestures, because if it starts off wrong, it won't happen, and those services won't be around when the government actually goes.

10 More minutes: From gift economies to celebration economies

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 02:34:30 PST

An article by Richard Heinberg, "Economic History in 10 Minutes" which I read the other day, inspired me to look a bit more into more elaborate economies than simply gift/tribal based, that might escape people's thoughts as they search for alternatives to the current (failed?) economic system.

His article is a good summary of a lot of peak oiler economics although I've heard him and others say these things before lots of times and in different ways. Heinberg points to our addiction to fossil fuels as the central reason for lots of current problems, and the article treasures hunter gatherer cultures with their gift economies as a possible future or as something to move towards. Doing something in 10 minutes is bound to leave something out. It would be easy to believe, reading his article, that we once were all happy and shared everything, then - boom! - iPods. (He actually says "So letting go of the gift economy was a trade-off for progress—houses, cities, cars, iPods, and all the rest").

After painting a pretty negative picture of the history of money, involving the sin of Usury, Charles Ponzi and Fractional Reserve Banking, leading to the current situation, he then goes on to make a call for more general knowledge of our shared economic history and to say "Is this the end of the story? As society dramatically simplifies itself in the wake of fossil fuel depletion, will we revert to some form of gift economy? Or will we catch and steady ourselves on some intermediate rung on the ladder of economic development?"

Well I'd like to take 10 more minutes to talk about a couple of those rungs I happen to know about.

You see, my dad is an economic historian, and also comes from a small Aymara ethnic minority (on my grandmother's side). So I grew up in a house full of books on economics, and in this family of refugees of the Pinochet regime, my only connection with the Aymaras were many pairs of Ojotas (sandals made from recycled tyres), lots of colourful cloths and clothes, memories of a couple of visits to villages like Putre and Codpa in Chile, and a few of the books in between the economics ones, which spoke of Aymara culture and their world view.

One book, "Holocausto al Progreso - Los Aymaras de Tarapacá" fascinates me still, with it's descriptions of preincaic aymara culture. It includes a reconstruction of what life must have been like for a few thousand people, who had adapted from around the 5th century BC up until the arrival of the Incas in the 14th century, to live in a really difficult environment involving the Andes mountains and the most arid desert in the world. And now it's on the internet, for any Spanish speaker to enjoy! This little stretch of Northern Chile, which is now just sea, desert and mountain, then also included some forests, which have since been swallowed by the Atacama desert. Here is a bit of a picture from the book, which I hope can help to show this:

So there were at least 4 distinct climates, and none of them could adequately support a large population on it's own. Living there were fishermen, hunter gatherers, shepherds and farmers. By sharing, these distinct groups made this area incredibly rich and varied. I wish I could have seen it.

Here is a google assisted translation of a few paragraphs of Holocausto al progreso showing this vivid picture, punctuated by community rituals, harvest times and hunting seasons, the building of dwellings, and sharing of produce that couldn't have been accomplished unless people got organised. From around page 99:

A schematic reconstruction of this so varied indigenous economy conjures the following image:

In autumn, i.e. March or April, the shepherds would leave their homes, major residential centers located high in the Cordillera, and their summer grazing grounds at altitudes above 4000m, and make their way towards winter grazing lands, at altitudes from 3000 to 3500 meters, where they occupy shacks and makeshift houses in the open fields.

Part of the male population would then migrate, taking with them a herd of llamas loaded with produce from these high altitudes (dried meat, wool, leather, textiles, quinoa, herbs, salt, animal fat etc.), to lower environments: the agricultural area, where small nuclei of farmers belonging to the same community, and seen as relatives, would have been busy working the fields during the summer, irrigating the terraces, and working and defending the crops against the local animals and birds.

When harvest times drew near, the shepherds would arrive from the mountains to assist in these efforts and in the conservation and storage of agricultural produce. A portion of the produce from the high Cordillera (and possibly even the Altiplano and the eastern valleys: coca and herbs), was provided to supplement the diet of the farmers and after the harvest feasts and ceremonies, the llama herders would take, in return, a part of the agricultural produce (potato, garlic, corn, squash, etc..) to the western lowlands.

In the forests of the longitudinal valley they would stop for a while to gather the fruit of the carob tree and to shepherd the pack animals, using the pods and fruits that this tree produces.

Later, in winter, these well fed shepherds and their herd of animals would cross the desert and coastal mountains and visit the fishermen and hunter gatherers of the coast. The herdsmen would take part in fishing, and in hunting seals whose inflated skins were made into rafts, on these shores devoid of timber. They also participated in shellfish harvesting, in the preservation of these products and in the collection of white guano, which was - along with rotten fish and locally mined saltpeter - a popular fertilizer for the agricultural terraces higher up.

With spring approaching, the herders would prepare for the return trip, leaving behind the rest of the produce they had brought from higher altitudes, and taking sea and coastal produce in exchange.

After another stop in the woods of the Tamarugal they would again help farmers in the foothills by cleaning the irrigation canals, preparing new terraces and sowing new seeds. They would leave there much of the seafood they had brought from the coast and, after the planting season, they would take some produce back to supply the shepherds and the community centers in the Andes.

The shepherds would still be in their winter pastures at this point, but once the herders arrived, they would return to their homes in the mountains, together with their relatives and join their entire herd, bringing products from the countryside, the coast and sea, as an indispensable supplement to their diet.

So in this way, the faldas del morro or "Hillslope" Aymara culture was able to maintain a much larger population than they could have if all those groups had been independent. The "economic" activities were not seen as travail as contemporary europeans would have called it. They had instead a religious and cultural dimension in which work was seen as celebration, and was indeed punctuated by lots of festivity. This image is a bit out of focus but it shows the calendar of festivals that accompanied this migration for the shepherd communities and the farming ones:

Going back to Heinberg's economic rungs, as we fall down the ladder from fractional reserve banking - I hope we don't forget these creative moments in our economic history, perhaps valuing "economic" migration and the celebration of work, as we adapt to the issues of the new millennium.

Free open source multitrack recording on an android phone

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:52:32 PDT

I've been recording rehearsals for a while using my android phone. This gives quite acceptable sound quality and some of it is even on soundcloud. It naturally led to me wondering if more than one track was somehow possible, and I've tried a few combinations of apps to see if they could work together, before getting to this method:

This process has only been tested on a G1 so far so I can't say for sure if this can be done on other phones. It's a bit tiresome but it proves that 2 track recording can be done. With a few changes to the apps that allow it, it could get a lot easier too.

1) Start by downloading Rehearsal Assistant and Ringdroid. Both these applications are open source, and both are listed on the android market.

2) Make a recording using rehearsal assistant first - it's easy - just push the big red button, but you may want to go into it's settings and set it to record directly as .wav files by selecting "Record Uncompressed Audio" under Recording Quality.

3) Once you have your recording you can play it back and if you long press it, lots of options will appear, including the option to open the recording in Ringdroid. Do this, and Ringdroid will start up.

4) Now you have to select what you want to save. The problem with Ringdroid is that it's mostly for making ringtones so it will by default only select a small part of your recording - I first zoom out as much as possible by clicking on the magnifying glass, and then try and select all the bits of the recording I want to have as a background track. Try and leave a few seconds of space at the beginning. You can edit it off later. Now save it as "music".

5) Open it again (how laborious!) by selecting from the various recordings available in ringdroid's list. Press the play button.

6) While the recording plays in ringdroid, hold down the home button so as to show up other recently used apps. Select rehearsal assistant again...

7) Now you can hear the first recording you did, and can also hit record again to record your second track.

For some reason if you do it this way, the background recording plays through completely and a second track doesn't sound too bad over it - I've tried to do this in other ways and it always cuts out when in the background for a few seconds.

Again, this is still for putting musical parts down together and seeing what two tracks might sound like superimposed, not for quality professional recordings. It reminds me of the 2 track recording that was possible using cassette players years ago.

Bristol's Budget Conversation and Town Hall BEPs

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:04:20 PDT

In case you are from Bristol and haven't noticed, there's currently a "big debate" being held over at http://askbristol.wordpress.com in the comments area.

Basically, the city council are asking the public how to cut the huge sums of money that they will have to do without anyway from very soon.

There are lots of reasons why this is flawed. As one commenter posted,

"This “consultation” is a pointless exercise without access to a clear summary of what is for the chop and doing it on the internet just encourages the lunatics. Are there any plans for proper town hall style meetings? Or is this just a sham?"

But still, I thought I'd publicise it, even if it's a sham, in case somehow it can get a bit closer to becoming an actual debate and taking of responsibility by all parties.

So how do you sift through all these comments and start to extract something resembling usefulness from it all? And how can the public actually get the data they need to make their choices with? Maybe Open Source Software can come to their aid, but as a method rather than as a piece of actual software:

Open Source projects are often overrun by suggestions or even implementations of disparate and confusing features and they have evolved ways to keep this problem at bay.

As the Python programming language project, an open source project, grew quickly towards the end of the 90s, it became obvious that a new way of managing feature requests was needed.

Some of these requests were duplicates of others, or deeply flawed or unimplementable, but each one would be argued on mailing lists or various forums each day. Also, with open source the problem is that sometimes the people making the suggestion don't actually have any ability to or interest in *doing* the work.

So the PEP(Python Enhancement Proposal) came into being. It's a standard document you fill out, that forces those submitting complex feature requests to turn them into focused, clear suggestions. PEP editors on the python team then reject or accept them based on these parameters.

I think a Bristol "town hall" group like the one proposed in the quote above, should be tasked with publishing appropriate stats and data, reviewing pep-like proposals by the wider public, and consulting with those affected by that proposal to ensure it actually makes a difference and doesn't cause more spending somewhere else. It could then also put these in action if passed, after which it would have to monitor the council's progress on them and report back on that too.

If this happened, I for one would help find venues to do this in, help set up the space and even figure out how to get everyone some refreshments!!

Ecologising Open Hardware

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Sun, 16 May 2010 04:49:26 PDT

I've come to realise, through my experiments and readings, and through spending months in the world of instrument design, that I had until now marvelled in the idealistic beauty of Open Hardware without considering it's limitations in much depth. I thought it might be time to start to see where this fantastic creative world still might fall short from the point of view of the various "green" threats around us.

This shiny new thing is the possibility of:

Having a brain wave.
ordering some cheap parts online,
Going through a creative process to produce
1. a circuit diagram,
2. a materials list and
3. parts list,
4. a printed circuit board
before finally assembling an item

Whilst designing what turned out to be my Bird Symbiot, a prototype of a system for outdoor sound generation, I visited and contacted lots of people in different occupations. It's not the most essential of applications but I do know a bit more about what happens between me recording some music, and it being played by a device, and about how it can be powered in a more sustainable way. As a project it spanned acoustics, mathematics, electronics, world music, sound generation and clay making. I had a lot to learn.

One of these visits was when I got help assembling my first circuit (a lady ada sound shield) from Marcus Valentine. He has been working in electronics for many years and has a home workshop for electronics design. The circuits he designs - usually the pieces in a larger pool, are sent off as diagrams and parts lists to process. They come back in a way similar to construction sets, with 200 or more mini circuit boards all printed together from the same slab of plastic.

This then, in a typical small electronic item's production process, goes back to a large company which then manufactures thousands of them.

At another point while making my Maker Faire exhibit, I needed some good solar panels, and synth maker Tom Bugs offered to give me some that he had ordered but never managed to use. He runs Bugbrand, which is an online shop, and also a small workshop in the area, doing electronics design of sound making devices. On the borders with open hardware, Bugbrand items are designed mostly in this mini Stokes Croft factory, and an online shop deals with the sales. Selling crazy music making electronics and boards seems very fitting in a place with as much experimental music in it as Bristol, and he also runs workshops internationally, where people make them themselves. I saw in his workshop a PCB printing work area for creating small runs or prototypes of circuit boards. He confessed he hadn't used it much. A colleague built the boards while he pretty much ran around concieving new boards, answering forum questions, ordering parts and selling the finished products online.

It was only much later, by speaking to other inventors and hackers at the Maker Faire, that I got to see more of the true Open Hardware manufacturing approach. Open Hardware makers will work alone as needed, but will often team up with small shops or other projects to order parts or design aspects of their work. The landscape of this creativity is really a friendly ecology of helpers, a small world where people begin to know each other.

Of course, the main benefit of open hardware is the supposed availability of plans and designs for the good of everyone else, but there is still no equivalent of the GPL or CC license when it comes to actual objects and things.

The open hardware approach seems to be going towards ordering components, then assembling and selling items in online markets in a semi bespoke manner. It's true, some are starting to do more: Feral Trade sells Cube Cola, which once amazed the BBC when they once sent for many litres of it. The order was neatly placed at the centre of their huge van, in a tiny concentrated bottle.

Cube Cola is published under the GPL, but beyond that, it has hit on a brilliant distribution method centred on the ready availability of sugar and fizzy water to dilute and prepare it with.

There is a convergence between the green and the techy in open sourcing Hardware - as seen in projects like the Reprap or larger open source cousins that can cut or shape metals or even precious stones. But this is not a typical aspect of it's lifecycle.

We have to begin cutting down on this politically, monetarily and ecologically fragile, long distance distribution network occurring at either end of this beautiful creative centre.

Another problem is the predilection for and reliance on high wattages. Maybe this is just the "macho" side of electronics - typically a men's world. There is little use of freely available energies that can be channelled to help these processes.

For the bird symbiot I realised pretty early on that making something audible at low power would mean using natural amplification. This turned out to mean using clay - something whose production I found to be readily available by using an old rag, some sticks and by ordering basic materials from a few miles outside Bristol, and a firing process used cooperatively in a local art studio.

But there is also a bias in some aspects of the tinkerer world, towards a repulsion ("ugh - knitting!") for what is seen as lesser "craft" rather than a welcoming of other disciplines in order to collaborate towards creating a device. But I hope this is only a marginal problem, and that some healthy partnerships can emerge soon. It will be significant to see some of the main open hardware proponents start to work in projects with larger scope than just the basic circuits, and requiring a wide range of skills and work shared by many different kinds of people.

At the Maker Faire in Newcastle, some of the biggest attractions used a tremendous amount of electrical power. Lots of the items I saw seemed to use a lot of money and electricity to run. I recently saw a lot of people turn their backs on what I thought was an interesting bike power project because people see it as not enough power to do anything useful. The bird symbiot uses the equivalent in solar power of 2 AAA batteries, and can burst into song with some good sunlight flying by it. A 3v fan on an oven or a wind powered pump for some water can mean the difference between a gruelling existence and a plentiful life.

But I think a basic flaw in the current open hardware lifecycle is just that: We rely still on the generation of power as if it had to be something separate from the rest of the device. It's excluded from the design process as soon as it ceases to be about electronics. So it all needs a more holistic and inclusive approach.

I also have some problems to do with why circuit design has evolved to be flat, and this makes the BEAM robotics world so fascinating - because they stich parts directly to each other creating a device that is by it's nature 3d and doesn't particularly need a board.

What will we do if with vanishing fossil fuels and the need for technologically aided alternative power, we can't make a transistor? A semiconductor? A resistor? - this new open hardware lifecycle needs to green itself at all levels.

So how do you do these things locally and sustainably?

If modern telecommunications and technology is to avoid a crash or stagnation due to whatever natural or man made catastrophes, there have to be freely available applications and designs of every type of electronic item. From vital to domestic, electronic ideas and inventions should be available to the public regardless of their wealth or place in the world. I think this is probably even a human right, linked directly to the right for an education - we have to know how to create and evolve the technologies that our lives and cultures depend on.

All aspects of modern electronics need thorough re-examination so as to find and document cheap ways to recreate them openly in light industry at a local scale, anywhere in the planet.

Maker Faire Exhibit - Weeks 3 and 4

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:08:42 PST

Last week I made the raku clay bird ornament in which the device will be kept, unless I can make a better one before the faire. It was a really interesting process to follow, and Hilda, the potter who showed me it, said things sometimes randomly emerge with clay, not always what you expect. I like that idea, as opposed to 3d design where you try and go for an exact shape. Also it shrinks 10% when it's fired, and so any calculations as to size or tuning would have to be done through lots of different models and trial and error, which I don't have time for as she is now going away for a bit, and I won't have access to her kiln again until after the maker faire.

I'm not completely happy with the results of my first big process of making: it's a bit small and the "bird" only happened randomly during the slab rolling process. But still, it's functional and I put a lot of stuff in it, that I know will need to go in any subsequent thing I make as an enclosure. It has only 2 openings at the top which I will put wires through and seal, it has holes in which to mount a stand, so that it can resonate a bit more fully, a small area in which to put some moss or other small plants, and a shelf inside in which to put the box with the arduino in it.

I then had a good chat with John Honniball and Tarim at PM Studios to see how to get the Maxim PMIC chips I ordered, working to power an arduino. The result is not good: there is a simple, if inefficient way to power one from a 9v battery, but the best way at the moment to get something better going, is to get a Mintyboost kit, and wire it to an 11v solar panel (which I have). The PMIC chips that Marcus Valentine suggested I use, will only work with panels of up to 5v, and anything beyond that will damage the arduino. John says it's a good idea to try the chips anyway, because if I can get anywhere with that, it will mean we can have an arduino running off very low power, and able to use that quite efficiently - so for example from a single AA battery or from a little cell battery. But most likely, it won't work.

This last week on the other hand, I've been learning about fast fourier transformations, wave table synthesis, granular synthesis and reading about the work of Ellen Fullman - who makes a long stringed instrument with a small sound box at either end for amplification. A very different design from mine. I also looked at the workings of recycled aluminium so as to create resonating cones and much more research. As well as this, I've been trying step back a bit and decide how the arduino will actually pick out the best readings and make them into a discernible song.

Firstly, it will be playing in little bursts all day. I hope this will make it more interesting and build up interest for the dusk concert. Most of the time it will just play the readings almost directly, as they are collected (which is what it is doing now), write the readings to EEPROM and turn itself off or go to sleep/power saving mode as much as it can. But if it thinks it's dusk, it will get ready to play something more complex.

In this more complex dusk concert, I want there to be single notes, with overtones and lots of silence in between, a gradual build up for each performance. There will be something resembling a trio of drone, melody and percussion, I think. This makes it easy to decide which role the 2 piezo outputs and 1 wave sample output will take on each time it decides to play.

In the style of an indian classical raga, I would then select 5 or 7 "notes" from the readings it has collected, and play them according to a repeating melody or ostinato pattern.

This would then be varied - the melody would be reached via the playing of small patterns that then build up in speed and complexity to be the pattern again.

Then this somehow builds up in speed and adds to recorded samples (played from the Adafruit Wave Shield).

Finally, it will end in a tihai figure, based again, on this ostinato.

A while ago I wrote a tabla beat that goes - if you understand this stuff,

Dha ti dha ge na dha ti dha ge na
ga dha ti dha ge na ga dha ti dha ge na
na ke na

There's a lot of variations to go with it, but that's the basic beat. This is in 25 beats, and I've divided into 5 / 5 / 6 / 6 / 3. The 25 beat structure means the tihai - if seen as 3 repetitions of a 33 beat variation on the main ostinato, will land back on the 100th - i.e back at the beginning of the next beat.

I've been trying to decide how much of hindustani classical and world music tradition to bring in to this though. Because then the symbiotic creature might become too much a reflection of my own interpretation than a true reflection of the readings it gathers. But as a mathematician friend remarked when I told him about this project, there are an infinite amount of ways to apply maths to numbers so as to extract sound, so maybe I should stop being so precious about it.

Many cultures ancient and new have music and songs reflecting or seeking to affect the seasons or time of day however, and I think there is a lot to learn from from that in this project.

Meanwhile though, here is a sound grab of the piezo portion of the symbiot, amplified using a small bodhran drum and using a prototype clay model I've now made as a container, and as a sound box. More to come soon!

Symbiotic Readings by alefernandez

Maker Faire Exhibit - Weeks 1 and 2

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:23:37 PST

It's not very often you get a chance to work on such a varied project. The brief for the project in the previous post on this blog, but I thought it useful to put down some thoughts at this stage in it's preparation. Especially in case I get lost later on.

Last week I did the first parts: I wired together light sensor, piezo buzzer and an electromagnetic field detector and they are sending data back to an arduino that is now capable of "sleeping" - i.e. switching to a lower power mode.

There are lots of ways of getting it to fall asleep though, and I prefer no power to lo-power as Newcastle is not known for it's warm bright weather (for example - this week, according to the newspaper, sunset came to Newcastle at 4.40pm, and the average temperature is of about 4-5 degrees with showers half the time, leading me to think rain power may have been a better choice than solar).

To amplify all the recorded and generated sounds this device is beginning to produce, I got a plant pot, and an old bohdran drum, into which I put the speakers and sound emitting bits. It helped the sound be fuller and a bit louder. I'm not aiming for a very noisy device, but something that's sonically fragile and can interplay with other noises in it's area.

Here is a video of the state of play last Wednesday:

Since then I've put together lots of solar cells of various different shapes and sizes, and I tried to test their voltage and current, and wire them up to a small circuit I got from here and here.

I'm planning on using some rechargeable coin cell batteries to do this. I tested the battery by putting it inside a little set of solar lights and seeing if it charged them. The lights were powered by a 3.2v, 250mAh battery, but they seem to work fine on a 3.7v 200mAh one too, all of which led me to wish I'd paid more attention in physics class at high school...

I also added the capability to detect temperature to the bit with all the sensors (the Seeduino seen in the video, which at the moment will only run sensors, before I put the whole contraption together and get it to play sounds as well).

And I've investigated a lot about clay, based on a long discussion with Mat Dalgleish. Clay and pottery is local to just about every place and culture in the world. It is strong, resistant to the outdoors (if fired at high temperatures), and above all it looks natural and earthy, and very fitting for housing all my electronic stuff, which may be functional, but it doesn't look very visually appealing!

So at the weekend, I got the (regular "das") clay out and spent a morning in the library, reading about pottery so I could get some handle on the basics. Then I started making (the children got involved too!). The result was this nice little ocarina, which actually plays a note when blown!

From my discussion with Mat, and from chatting today with Hilda Bligh, a local and very experienced potter, who will let me use her kiln, we went for Raku. This is a 16th century Japanese/Korean technique which produces nice and very random colours, and can be fired at high temperatures. Hilda was very generous and treated me to some lovely soup and gave me some cheesewire, lent me a clay roller, and got me lots of nice oxides(iron, yellow iron, copper and some iron filings), as well as a big heavy pack of raku clay!

As well as this, she gave me a quick class on simple raku pottery. I'm planning to cut a slab of clay, and roll it into a cylinder. Then I'll try and shape it and glaze it. This first experiment will probably fail(she suggested I make 3 experiments to begin with), but I'll try and add a sketch of what it should look like so that it can house the arduinos, allow for leakage, provide a simple way to place all the sensors around it, and hold the solar panels high up. Also, I might add some cones or tubes to it (as I did with the first clay experiment) to make it look more like a tree...

Later this week I plan to experiment more with the thermistor (for which I'll need a thermometer...), and with all the readings on the piezo circuit. I'll also try the first step of the raku process.

The solar panels also will need to be wired together some more and tested/ experimented with for readings. Next week, I hope to finally get to the musical bit!

OMOSP

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:25:19 PST

An outdoors low consumption, self powering musical installation.

This blog post is about the design and creative process around the concept of an art object I'm making, to be displayed at the UK Maker Faire in Newcastle in March.

The intent is to install in an outdoors area, various sensors and various sound sources - mostly amplified piezos as well as a wave shield. These will be guided by an arduino which is powered in turn by various solar panels. The device will capture sunlight during the day (I'm also considering windmill or crank power), and gathers readings through the day and night to play a short "concert" at dawn and dusk.

The readings are light, temperature, sounds, humidity and, I hope, some simple electrode type readings, for which I'm currently experimenting with EMF, which I hope to couple with a second one, so as to have a sort of electrode.

When light reaches a threshold, the device plays a melody based on readings gathered, fires off a recorded sound according to the amount of energy it has stored with which to play it, and plays the piezo melody over the wave background. I would hope speed would slowly increase, and it remains to see if further ongoing readings would influence the performance also.

Background

I first wanted to do something of this type years ago, as the value of printed CDs decreased, and they lost value in my mind as well as monetarily as a way of distributing or experiencing music due to them being ripped almost immediately, and due to the songs then living on various media in large libraries.

How could I separate a musical composition and it's experience from this media environment, I wondered, and I thought it would be interesting to embed recordings inside an object, in such a way as to make the sound a part, not the result, of a full experience. I hope there will still be regular media on this creation, but that this will be a derivative, a copy, not the original.

I imagine one day walking up a hill or to a remote spot, and only then, by knowing the times of dusk and dawn, hearing the sounds of the creation. Or as the composer and maker of the device, I would get to travel to it, and fix it, dry it out or re tune it every so often.

Areas of work

In designing this device, I'm trying to keep to the idea that simple is good and that all parts need not be connected so as to sound or result in a coherent experience. I want the sound to reflect the time of year and type of day, in the sense that in a cold, dark, still day, only a couple of notes might play, whereas on a hot or windy day, there would be a symphony of noise lasting several hours. In the style of the Morning and Evening Raga in Indian Classical music, the musical style is different also according to the time of day, and this should be reflected in the way sensor data is interpreted and played back. For example, in a morning raga, the sound starts very gradually, and builds up in speed and volume only towards the end. An evening raga is much more of a performance than a meditation in this sense.

Sensors
Thermistor for the temperature sensing: test and review the one I have, connect to second life. Temperature should change gradually, not more than 12 degrees in a day I am hoping... so this is rhythm, and will dictate the activities of the avatar that will be connected to it. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=2218
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/ComponentLib/Thermistor

A light sensor (or 2?) - test should be working - just got a better resistor and connected a piezo to it. It works. Light readings will be connected to the interrupt, so when it wakes, it will measure all the sensors, write them to eeprom, and then based on the light sensor value and it's change from the previous reading, decides whether to wake up and play.

A battery charge sensor: Very simple to make... the tutorial is online somewhere. Based on this it decides for how long it can play a piece, and wether to play a long sound via the wave shield or just a piezo based generative melody using various smaller, individual wave sounds only towards the end.

thermistor - temperature sensing: Trying with a small bead thermistor, out of 3 bought from maplins. Circuit is almost done.

Plant monitor: Built, working a bit randomly... I plan to show this to Marcus Valentine, get it working properly, measure the resistance on a multimeter (borrow one!), and connect it up to the rest of the device.

EMF detector: Built, and giving very random data. Almost a random seed. Need to add smoothing function. Need to disconnect this from the music emission if Serial.available().

Boards and Power Architecture

An Arduino Duemilanove to connect to a Lady Ada wave shield. (I will have spare arduino from Mat, and a Seeeduino). Currently developing the sensors on the seeduino and working on the wave shield on the duemila: will have to put it all together at some point!

Find out how much power this shield draws(lady ada forums).
How much time do I want the musical object to play stuff? Half the day yes half no? And how loud? What to play? Current idea is mornings and evenings. But at night, will it be able to charge from small 3v windmills?!
Find out how much power the whole thing draws and if a second circuit can be built to wake it up.

Solar Setup
A solar panel capable of charging enough for power requirements. I looked on solarbotics as well as on Adafruit, but Farnell and other closer ones to the UK (i.e without a 3 week or so delivery time) are probably better.

Tom Bugs of nearby BugBrand has also given me about 4 of the more modern smaller solar cells, and some diodes, which I have still to test, so as to do a part of this. They are 2 szgd4026 cells (4v, 20mA) and 2 SZGD5020-A cells, around 2v. All together, they can give 12v, if only for a small about of time.

Maybe just the seeduino on it's own would be an accomplishment. I probably will need to get one of the other ones, and power some of it also maybe from the other solar panels I already have.

A way of reducing the power consumption during the night (having only a small battery powered circuit with a timer chip may be a way.

1 solar panel from a garden light set, that charges a 3.2v, 250mAh battery, which I have replaced with my rechargeable coin cell battery from coolcomponents (3.7v, 200mAh) , to see if it can deal with it. Stupid? Maybe, but fun!

I also have a variable one that does 3v easily during the entire day, but is quite big.

And finally, given to me by Tom Bugs. I'm guessing a regular AA 3.2v battery can probably charge itself through the day and take readings during the night. The idea with power is to make sure there is always enough of it.

Wave recordings
I built a lady ada wave shield with Marcus Valentine's Help.
It has been running "pi", and works fine with this first test program.
Convert a lot of sample music and backgrounds to the correct format from my external hard drive load up samples via SD card reader.
Get a feel for what sounds good alongside the piezos.
Make some ambient recordings also.

Arduino Sketch
Needs to incorporate interrupts and put arduino to sleep until light level changes. Depending on value of light level it chooses weather to play a melody. http://www.uchobby.com/index.php/2007/11/24/arduino-interrupts/
http://rubenlaguna.com/wp/2008/10/15/arduino-sleep-mode-waking-up-when-receiving-data-on-the-usart/
Data logging needs to use EEPROM functions for read/write.
Needs to be able to select and play from wave shield. If easy, play also some shorter files in different speeds, perhaps for shorter concerts.

Pseudocode:
Cast an initial drone based on average temperature.

If connected to a computer, EMF signals are ignored and replaced perhaps by output from Opensimulator, coming back from Ironpython.
(one that slowly moves between averages of readings taken during the night)
duration = readBatterySensor
play(duration)

Play(duration)
choose a wave file to play, or a structure using various shorter wav files if there is very little charge.
read from eeprom some sensor values
play values in descending order.
play a melody with beat, melody values, according to how many sensor readings made since last time.

Problem: what if it loses all it's charge while making readings?

IronPython/Open Simulator Code
This script takes serial readings from the arduino and then sends them to a virtual avatar running via LibOpenMetaverse in the 3d world Open Simulator which is an open source world similar to second life. At the moment, it will be easy to trigger a serial call in the form of a command, such as "get readings", or to play one of the sound sources directly.

This will allow for some form of online interaction with the device when connected to this code via the serial cable (and therefore without issues of battery capacity or song duration! ). The character's user name is Abies Alba, and mine is Nima Macchi on osgrid.org - please come by and say hi if you use these things!

Casing
Some amplification can be done using the shape and texture of clay, wood or plastic. Shape, size and colour will be important aspects.

A suggestion from Tom Bugs is to build it all inside a tube obtained from a hardware shop. Put the solar panel on top, then speaker at bottom and hang it from somewhere. Also there is someone on youtube who has made a balafon from plant pots by securing it in such a way as to allow it to vibrate. Am trying this with wave shield and a small platform with good effect. Plastic, transparent drum skin might be best for light sensor to poke through, and for piezos.

For the Clay part, which I think will be quite important, it is possible to make a DIY kiln, but I've also asked various people and best plan seems to be to go to the art college in clifton and ask to use theirs.

Stokes Croft 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:20:27 PST

Most people symbolically see birth of the robotic race as 2015, when those famous wikicars escaped from the race course, rode into their trainers, and escaped into the desert. They do not realise that the first large scale battles to use robotic killers was not just the well known oil wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this had begun far far before, in these few streets of Bristol UK known as Stokes Croft, where all the new electronics factories had come to converge.

In Bristol, in the valley of dilapidated houses swathed in graffiti between Montpelier and Kingsdown there was once an insurrection, and a great battle, with augmented free running kids fighting police, then the army, each other, and finally fire juggling armies of anarchist clowns as well as the more familiar modified urban fauna we know today (at first with abortive attempts to domesticate wild Foxes, followed by the now familiar Slug, Seagull and Crow, with effects we all remember with such apprehension and shock today).

We now have discovered data and remains from the depths of the hole in the ground where that part of the city once stood, in that valley, where we had once thought all to be obliterated, consumed by a plague of nanobots, which allows us to trace this insurrection even further before this series of urban revolts and confrontation at times of deep crisis. We have found that there was a question of data, surveillance and censorship, which led to a citizens mesh network to be created using hidden transfers between generic everyday electronics.

As times became harder it would become a matter of life and death for these humans to be able to zap the data out of a drone or destroy it at the right moment if it meant being able to access the right technology or data from the net, or if it meant being able to build the weapons that really mattered. Government drones were at first well built creatures with firearms and permission to kill the citizens of Bristol. But they were soon only one of many different types of small aerial solar robot. With solar cell prices going down drones were soon running around protecting gardens, walking children to school, but above all collecting and sending messages and data. Everywhere, umbrella frames became 6 legged walking mechanisms, bottles became batteries, bags were woven into skin and all the useless old desktop computer hardware from the dot com boom and bust across the valley of Stokes Croft was stripped of motors, cameras and sensors in small and prosperous factories that sprung up as the world demanded anti surveillance tools and Bristol answered that call.

Neighbourhoods set up monitoring and data carrying devices of their own and used these at first alongside and then against the drone evidence machine, often following directions from bored staff working overtime hunched over a workstation on a bonus pay system. At first they had been surveillance devices, frequently subject to attack by thieves, vandals and police alike, but soon benefiting from the hive mind of the internet as their owners and maintainers shared their knowledge and perfected their ability for speed and dominance of the skies and land. The energy sources and human uses multiplied with each code update. The source code and algorithms for life and behaviour that most people use today, are mostly re-elaborations and reconstructions of the scripts used back then.

But it was the anger of the people that finally equipped these first bots with guns, tazers and knives, and not least with a shared universal operating system that allowed different robots to work together for the first time, and semantic learning chips equipped with a distributed survival instinct which would enable them fight a large army. But it was not to be. The whole place was completely destroyed after increasingly desperate battles between the local factions of the time, long before that tired army ever got back to the valley of central Bristol. They had had enough on their hands in their foreign battles for resources abroad, and various police mutinies, and they soon split off into various militia, before eventually inspiring and pioneering the building of the domes and shared spaces which became that centre of living birth and creation that we know this city as today.

Ironically, it was an open source recipe for a nanobot, by around 2015 being made in many illegal factories across the world, which was the demise of the Stokes Croft rebellion, and the buildings around it, 250 metres into the ground.

If you'd like to make one, take one strip of carbon nanotube, which you will use to contain all the ingredients.

Into this, put in a nanomachine, some xor gates, some dust from a magnet and an energy sucker. Mix it well.

Don't try this incantation near your local parts supply area unless you want a gigantic crater in it though.

images from
http://www.thisischris.com/uploaded_images/Robot-and-Bird-03_small-779473.jpg

http://flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/2167298500/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielproulx/3963404104/

Plant Electrodes

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:08:09 PST

I've been doing more late night research on electrodes. This is a good way to create an interface between machine and plant, or machine and animal, and it's basically a wire on a living surface, like a plant or your skin somewhere, and another one close by going out to complete a circuit. It passes current through this non metallic surface, between anode and cathode, and then you measure the resistance you detect. Then the medical ones get much more complicated, and easy to apply or stick to someone.

I started thinking about electrodes when planning a slug detector project, which would use the electrode in order to detect (or cast and then measure discrepancies in) an electrical field. Casting and detecting changes in, or just detecting electrical fields is a form of animal communication used in very primitive underwater animals, mostly to hunt prey or detect possible predators. Because slugs tend to go out on rainy nights, this would work mostly when there was water around this machine. It would generate or detect an electric field the size of a slug and then fire off an action if it does (like take a photo or open a beer trap), but now I'm moving on from molluscs and applying it to plants, as a kind of home made EEG.

The reason I'm talking about these things is I've been trying to make a garden sound object (GSO), or a Musical Raga Automaton (MRA) or an Arduino Powered Renewable Energy Symbiot (APRES), but really I've not really found a good acronynm for the thing so far. It's entered into the Newcastle Maker Faire 2010, as an outdoors exhibit.

It will also have a plant monitor to detect soil humidity, a light sensor and a thermistor to detect temperature.

So back to electrodes. Various ways to spread the pain/effect - http://www.bodyclock.co.uk/acatalog/tenselectrodes.html like with those electrodes, all more comfortable than a naked wire on your skin coming from some machine. It allows my musical automaton project to consider an even deeper symbiosis, whereby it could become the musical soundtrack for either a particular patch of land, or for a particular plant, a long lasting one, such as a bush or a tree.

This might be a more advanced one. This arduino page mentions simple electrodes.

Here is someone who has built a very simple windmill system. It could be good for a distributed windmill light or battery charging project. It's the simplest possible cardboard coil generator, which I'm sure could be attached to a rotor of some kind and made into a workshoppable item, using old hard disk magnets, LED lights and some old CD cases...

I thought more about green noise, and about going around and collecting some sounds from around bristol, maybe the water in the rivers and drains, the sound of the motorway at night, the air at the top of the hill... If I can get it sounding a bit like white noise, I'll know I'm close...

Today I got a step closer to a white noise circuit, but also built the Lady Ada Wave Shield, which I now hope to get working on my Seeeduino. Which brought me to consider once again the outdoor garden musical automaton(OGMA) and what sensors it should have, how it should interface with people and plants.

It should play each day differently through the year, so that in 30 degree heat you get more wave recordings and longer more intense sounds, using the higher amounts of energy collected by the solar panels and / or windmills on it. I don't know where to put a stop to it, but it will take a lot of testing - adding and removing piezos, wether sensing or buzzing, adding/removing light sensors, getting a temperature sensor and testing out a simple electrode or 10 on a plant (my poor aloe vera is wincing at the prospect).

In the winter, it will only play sparse sounds and try and calculate it's current remaining before attempting anything complex.

At night, the Noise Generating Automaton (NGA) will monitor certain readings, and go into a low power mode, still powered mostly by windmills charging some batteries. It will build a file with statistics based on these readings, and use that in the morning when it wakes up.

When light passes a certain threshold, it will generate a low frequency noise which increases as light does. When the sun is almost up, it will have got to being like a base tune, which jams following a pattern dictated by the temperature and humidity sensor's readings for the night.

Using Lady Ada's wave shield, some simple speaker housing, some piezo buzzers (here is an early test of one) and some natural resonant housing, I can produce enough amplification to create this hopefully inobtrusive garden soundtracker(HIGS). What is left to figure out is what to put it in that is both pleasing to look at and resistant to the humid newcastle climate... I'm considering Sugru and sealed glass or if all else fails, the typical plastic containers that you can buy at maplins again, for a few squid (Ah, another mollusc!).

The Garduino project will provide great help I think, as will Mike Skylar's experiments.

Second Life / Open Simulator Arduino Project Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:03:33 PST

Here is my thinking on this:

Devobot is an IronPython framework that allows you to trigger animations, movement and chatting to a Second Life or OpenSimulator based avatar using the open source libopenmetaverse library. I used this software in my bot work in a recent archive / 3d model of the Pompeii Court of the Sydenham Crystal Palace.

PySerial on the other hand, allows IronPython based serial comms. Serial comms can also be done via .net frameworks - example is in C#, but it should be a good reference for an ironpython version.

An arduino microprocessor can be hooked up using an adapted version of the light sensor tutorial on http://arduino.cc/ - but for example, triggering animations or chat responses according to the light level or to other sensors I might be able to think of. Maybe eventually growing in complexity until, naturally, a wiimote is added for IR tracking.

So the question is - will it work?

3 possibilities: Hackspace Bristol, DMT and the Aquatrick

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:52:09 PST

Today I had some important realisations and considerations about various projects I'm working on - Hackspace Bristol, the Green Noise Open Hardware Project, and the invention of the Aquatrick, a water based, sensor controlled, light projecting device. I don't know how related they are except for this snowy day in Bristol, but that's life, and here they are:

1. Hackspace Bristol

Here is a project plan/wish list of sorts for Bristol Hackspace, which is currently based at Coexist/Hamilton House in Bristol:

Bristol Hackspace will be a feature of Stokes Croft and active contributor to it's attractions as a local and international centre of alternative arts and culture, adding a technological aspect to the existing local autonomous spaces, and hopefully working with these and with the wider world-wide hackerspace or makerspace (and dorkbot?) movements as well as many others. To this I hope to be able to assist by curating events, co-ordinating workshop series' as well as one-off and off-site events featuring our members or invited guests, and co-ordinating arts/object production. I think one main use of the hackspace will be this last one. Supply, as well as in house production and sale of open hardware creations might take place, from simpler Arduino based devices to more complex or diverse projects such as the RepRap, Lifetrac or Hexayurt.

A lot of dorkbot/hackspace participants would like laser cutters, 3d printers and the like, so it just depends what we can get funded, donated, or made ourselves, but cheaply.

It would be great to also get to mess with other workshop environments, such as Chris Chalkley's planned kiln workshop some day, which he is planning for his Stokes Croft China sensation...

Also, there will certainly be the more artistic inventions by our own members or international or well known or common sense open licensed ideas. These can be worked on during electronics or arts related workshops, or simply made by hand or mass produced so as to sell in our (fingers crossed!) Stokes Croft shop front.

Members can pay several levels of monthly fee which contribute to the basic running costs and rent, but we could also go for various different types of funding on a project basis and hopefully sponsorship from creative, community based, educational and business related establishments around the city that might begin to also benefit from our classes and various types of open, participatory crafting events.

And now for something completely different:

2. I may have invented my own religion, or, DMT's important connections with Buddhist and other spiritual practices.

I realised also today that there is a link of some kind between the plant and animal chemical DMT and a more Buddha-like state of being. DMT is a powerful psychedelic drug also manufactured by the human brain (some say the pineal gland at the centre of the brain). Nam Myoho Renge Kyo on the other hand is the chant, rhythm and teaching at the centre of Nichiren Buddhism and it's various offshoots. In this, a Mahayana interpretation of Buddhist teachings, Buddhahood is a pervasive force inside every living being, an absolute force and potential for good in everything, which is said to have taken place whilst he sat by a Pipal tree - Ficus religiosa - for many days, eating only what fell from this tree.

A typical Nichiren Buddhist's personal practice might involve study, application of buddhist teachings in their daily lives, and chanting anything from 10 times a day to even so called "5 by 5s" - 5 hours a day for 5 days, to an inscription in a scroll called a Gohonzon.

In simple terms the purely Buddhist belief is that by doing this we make ourselves more in rhythm with this absolute, positive energy that pervades the universe, and that by doing so we are able to have the wisdom, fortune and timeliness to be in the right place in the right time so as to make a large difference in life for oneself and others - in essence, to be a hero, able to behave like a Buddha at all times.

The reason I make this probably blasphemous assertion about dimethyl-tryptamine is due to the Green Noise Experiment I put on as a performance art/mind hack experiment at the Arnolfini Arts Centre here in Bristol in December 2009 (see previous entry on this blog for links). Basically, I put ping pong balls over the eyes of around 38 participants in a darkened space, and gave them various types of continuous white noise, green noise or pink noise to listen to for either 5, 10 or 20 minutes each.

This experiment in sound and open hardware was more to do with a inducing an also mildly psychedelic, but more hypnagogic state similar to that encountered when falling asleep or possibly during sleep paralysis, but it led me to look up various wikipedia articles about DMT production and read about various other experiments to see if there was a known link between DMT and the ganzfeld procedure I had used.

In the words of some participants in a well known DMT study in the 90s by Doctor Rick Strassman of the book "The Spirit Molecule", when injected with doses of 0.2 to 0.4 mg/kg of this very simply structured derivative of the amino-acid tryptophan:

(in the beginning, volunteers would experience vibration and many colours would appear, and begin to form complex patterns, like a curtain, which Dr Strassman in this case encourages his subject to go beyond)

"At that point it opened, and I was very much somewhere else. I believe it was at that point that I went out, into the universe-being, dancing with, a star system.."

and a few days later, from the same subject

"I am changed. I will never be the same. To simply say this almost seems to lessen the experience..."

"The great power seemed to fill all possibilities. It was "amoral" but it was love, and it just was. There was no benevolent God, only this primordial power. All of my ideas and beliefs seemed absurdly ridiculous. I never wanted to forget this..."

"I had no idea how long I was in this confluence of pure energy, or whatever/however I might describe it. Finally, I felt myself tumbling gently and sliding backward away from this light"

There is lots more where this came from, and in my experiment I was reminded of this effect in particular by the green noise diffraction effect that participants in the Green Noise Experiment had, and how relevant it seemed then, that white noise in particular, is the sound of absolute randomness all at once, of every possible wavelength and noise put together, whereas green noise was just a more natural and accessible version of this same universal sound due to it's frequent existence in the natural as well as urban environment, and that it might somehow be linked to what we are trying to achieve in Buddhist practice.

I have still to figure out if there was any prevalance in mystical or spiritual experiences in the Green Noise experiment, but the event certainly felt imbued with a positive energy - so many people were so pleased and thankful to have had a chance to try the machine.

My point of view of death, as a Buddhist, is that in dying we fall back into a sea, like an individual wave rejoining a larger whole. In more practical terms, I'd say we visibly fall back into a shadow of our previous selves, the atoms that once made us function slowly merging with other organisms or environments and the changes we make slowly losing relevance.

Although our minds may be gone in death, the memories of those around us, the inspiration, ideas and lessons we may have taught or inspired in others, and the effects of our actions in life carry on.

These changes we make in life, in our families, and in wider society and the environment around us can still can be seen long before and after a single lifetime, as we are seeing day to day with the current environmental and economic situation. This concept seems to have such a huge similarity with what is seen in the space of around 5 minutes in Dr Strassman's DMT subjects.

This thought is very enlightening, and I feel very lucky to be in both the worlds of art oriented electronics and music, and a Buddhist, so as to be able to have this realisation. I don't know if it will lead to anything, or where if so, but it certainly seems important and life changing right now to look into how I might improve my Buddhist practice through creating and using these Ganzfeld devices and through the use of what I've myself called no more than mind hacks.

Doctor Strassman, I believe, has figured out a way to measure DMT in the blood, so it seems worth testing a link between this and the practice of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, as well as many other Buddhist practices, not least Tientai, also known as Zhiyi, the founder of the Tendai, or Lotus School of Buddhism.

This was a chinese monk who around the year 575 declared the Lotus Sutra to be the highest teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha's sutras, intended for many generations after his time due to the time not being ripe for it to be spread widely when it was conceived.

The Lotus Sutra itself was probably compiled from oral teachings long after Shakyamuni's death.

Zhiyi added to existing meditative practices in year 600 China, the practice of "Great Concentration and Insight", (which I've also seen probably mis-translated as "Stopping and starting") - a complex system of self-cultivation practice that also incorporated devotional rituals and confession/repentance rites.

Nichiren Daishonin, in 13th century Japan, then simplified this practice into the Nam Myoho Renge Kyo chant heard today, taking inspiration from contemporary Buddhist schools offering simpler, more universally accessible practices, and from his own readings into Buddhist teachings. Nichiren's followers and practitioners today strive to make concrete changes in their lives through their practice.

I believe DMT is a vital ingredient in Buddhist practice - a fact which doesn't lessen it's beauty to me in the slightest, and as shown by Dr Strassman, is also present in many other spiritual practices worldwide, and I think this link urgently deserves further investigation.

The Aquatrick

The third truth I would like to tell you about, is that I just thought of an interesting device to make. It is a lamp, which includes an inverted LED in a reflective concave surface, shining onto a small pool of water, in a reflective container. This creates pleasant moving lights on the walls and roof around the device, so it is also a projector, or lava lamp-ish item. On the top of the device, as well as an "on" button are some sensors that allow a user to control the movement of some servo based or electromagnetic mechanisms that stir the water beneath, creating waves. This means passers by, or single / multiple users can influence the movement of the reflections around them. The water might also sound nice, but the shape of the object is probably crucial! And so ends another gathering of quite unrelated truths and future possibilities.

Green Noise Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:48:39 PST

This post relates to my "Green Noise Experiment" at Uncraftivism, Arnolfini Bristol, 12-14 December 2009.

An experiment will be carried out producing 3 devices capable of inducing hallucinations through sensory deprivation.

A CD player and headphones containing 20 minutes of green noise, and some ping pong balls and sticky tape to cover eyes. I'm considering creating a second CD with some natural green noise collected from around Bristol.

a white mask with an arduino microprocessor and 2 piezoelectric buzzers producing white noise near the wearer's ears. Current status - the white noise device and white piezoelectrically modified earmuffs are ready. I've decided not to use the mask. It fits and works, but is easy to break and difficult to put on

Two simple white and pink noise circuits (made with the help of other dorkbot members) one using Linear Feedback Shift Circuits and Xor chips, and the other using an even simpler "good enough for me" pink noise circuit. I will be constructing some piezo earmuffs on Sunday morning so that one of these machines can also be used by participants.

All three devices will be usable in some way by the audience, who will be able to wear the device in a quiet area for up to 20 minutes, and will be invited to write their experiences for posterity.

Here, meanwhile is the code for device #2: the arduino based white noise generator, from Dorkbot member John Honnibal:



/* Pseudo-Random Bit Sequence Generator                     2009-11-25 */
/* Copyright (c) 2009 John Honniball, Dorkbot Bristol                  */

/*
* For a discussion of PRBS generators, see The Art Of Electronics, by
* Horowitz and Hill, Second Edition, pages 655 to 660. For more info
* on Linear Feedback Shift Registers, see Wikipedia:
*   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_feedback_shift_register
* For the actual shift register taps, refer to this article on noise
* generation for synthesisers:
*   http://www.electricdruid.net/index.php?page=techniques.practicalLFSRs
*/

// Choose the same pin as the "Melody" example sketch http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/PlayMelody
int speakerPin = 9;

unsigned long int reg;

void setup ()
{
// Serial setup for debugging only; slows down the program far too much
// for audible white noise
Serial.begin (9600);

// Connect a piezo sounder between Ground and this pin
pinMode (speakerPin, OUTPUT);

// Arbitrary inital value; must not be zero
reg = 0x55aa55aaL;
}


void loop ()
{
unsigned long int newr;
unsigned char lobit;
unsigned char b31, b29, b25, b24;

// Extract four chosen bits from the 32-bit register
b31 = (reg & (1L <<>> 31;
b29 = (reg & (1L <<>> 29;
b25 = (reg & (1L <<>> 25;
b24 = (reg & (1L <<>> 24;

// EXOR the four bits together
lobit = b31 ^ b29 ^ b25 ^ b24;

// Shift and incorporate new bit at bit position 0
newr = (reg << reg =" newr;">

It works a treat! I think the arduino and it's batteries might be happy to live in a bottle with wires coming out of it into the mask. The first thought when the circuits were ready was that I'll have to add an on / off switch.

This morning I made some video of the first stages of putting together a mask for the ping pong ball eyes, hoping to mix them soon.

A simple way to apply ping pong balls to eyes comfortably is by glueing some cotton wool around the edges but I have gone for taping the half balls directly. The white mask will hopefully be a step up from this. It is not complete but will be on show, in case ideas come forward for improving it.

As you can tell, the experiment has now taken place. There are now write ups in various places, and possibly followup information on the _GNE Device and the piezoelectric earmuffs or other information will follow soon on this blog.

Electronic Ideas and Experiments

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:56:33 PST

LED lights.

This is a simple idea which has already led some local artists to make shiny balloons to light up a pier, and has inspired a teenager to start a business and win various entrepreneurial and inventing awards with something that leaves most open hardware or electronics enthusiasts cold and blank.

Basically the most simple thing you can build using electronics is an LED attached to a resistor, and both ends of those two, attached to a battery. Another simple variation on this is the throwie, which is LED + Battery + magnet (so it sticks to what you throw it onto).

To many this is old stuff, far too simple to be interesting any more, but to me the simplicity of the design is beautiful:

But it's actually a lot more fluid than that picture, made of bendable wires that could go anywhere, and could be arbitrary lengths really.

LED light can be very directional and will project really nicely on to things, so an LED tree made of wire or pipes that you can position seems a good idea. LED technology is also getting better fast. Switches to turn on or off can be made using just metal bits or pins so there's loads of space for considering not the electronic aspects, but the design of the object and what it would feel like or what it would be for. So doing some kind of LED lighting unit where each one is switchable and autonomous would be brilliant. But how to do it...

I would like to create an LED light system for a tiny stop motion home theatre using my Arduino. I have to find out how to power at least 3 different coloured LEDs. I think I have 5V so maybe I need to figure out how to do the lights at different times. But then what to encase them in so that they are easy to position, and how to turn them on and off. Here is a simple lighting test I did:

Solar power

Once I'd build my first arduino based prototype, my main worry was those huge panels of 4 AA batteries at a time that are needed for this kind of thing. It is far too much consumption and the first thing to do would be to switch to rechargeable batteries.

Once you have rechargeable batteries though, the next step is to figure out how to wire in a small solar panel and let it be self sufficient. The thing I want to be self sufficient will be able to generate sounds from a buzzer in some kind of container that can naturally amplify it(a pumpkin has been suggested for this), as well as play electronic beeps to it, from a piezo. So it follows that if this is playing all day it will be annoying, whereas if it uses only a little energy and has to save up energy before it can play for a while, it will only give a couple of concerts a day, which may be more interesting than a constantly sounding device.

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/2008/03/connecting-solar-panel-to-arduino.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/Self-Sufficient-Arduino-Board/

http://residentialsolarelectricity.diycreation.com/sun-tracking-solar-panel-w-arduino/ <- fun stuff

White Noise Generator
I want to do a psychological experiment using sensory deprivation to induce a hallucinatory state. This will use a white noise generator and ping pong balls remove auditory and visual inputs from the wearer, excepting the LED lights which will follow the overall luminicence of the device and light up at some moments to trigger a colour perception. It will need a simple and small hat with the required attachments: a white noise generator, and some LEDs that light up randomly at the side of the eyes when the room darkens and a light diode to detect light (although this can be done with an LED as well).

Initial links to useful chips and bits that might help:
http://www.edaboard.com/ftopic302943.html
http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/3469
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/1521
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1169001613
http://processing.org/discourse/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1234706777

Marcus Valentine suggests using a linear feedback shift register to do this with, and John Honniball says this would need quite cheap chips, easily available here and there. Here are some links explaining it:

http://web-ee.com/schematics/noise_generation/scalable-noise-generator/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_feedback_shift_register

Using simpler chips and boards than Arduinos

The natural progression from using an arduino to prototype something is to want miniaturisation and to try and make the thing cheaper to keep as a permanent object. I don't want to have to take my arduino out and build it all back up again each time, so circuits will get soldered, and ideally, the arduino will be then used in turn to program a smaller, less expensive chip with what is needed to just do it's job (minus all the USB connection and other arduino stuff that make them simple). The end result is you have a small device you can make more of, running on a simple chip. This can work well for stuff like musical instruments or other semi bespoke work.

http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/
http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/electronic/detail_avrusb500.html
http://www.futurlec.com/
http://fundamental.antville.org/
http://code.google.com/p/mega-isp/
http://drug123.org.ua/mega-isp-shield/

Beyond the netbook: Making the simplest open source arduino based microcomputer

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:14:06 PDT

Today's arduino based microprocessors are no match for the computing power of an ARM chip. Most of these chips can easily run Linux, or proprietary systems like WinCE, and they power most of our phones as a result of much earlier electronic experimentation, as show by last week's Micromen BBC program, about the Acorn vs Sinclair battles of the 80s.

A fully capable ARM chip able to control a complex thing like a mobile with it's full color displays and wifi, 3g bluetooth etc will cost a minimum of 150 pounds(and that's just for the chip), and so for hardware hacking isn't really worth the investment, as no-one will buy it for £150 when you can buy a proper ARM based phone at Tescos for 15 pounds.

But an arduino can still be the basis for some kind of cheap system, perhaps one that costs only around 50 pounds to prototype.

What I'd like to see though isn't a project to make something that mimics phones, but is to make a functional leap and create the simplest possible thing that can serve as a household computer, taking the most basic functions: communication, data transfer, storage and interface, and concentrating on being low power, cheap to make and open in design.

Things to use:

Voice: OCR to Voice, voice to text etc, getting rid of keyboards. (Although the processing power needed for this might not make it a good idea. Maybe it would only record messages, send them around and play them back.
"Touchscreen" or head tracking as with http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ and other ideas.
Casing: Recycled materials. Tire, sensors from old electronic items, mass produced plastic packaging etc, natural materials such as bamboo and balsa.
It could use sd cards for storage, send data over audio channels, and we could copy data in and out using the miniusb.
Could a photo sensor and piezo combine to create an interface perhaps? The photosensor would do distances, and piezo would check for sound. Sound + distance can easily reproduce the rubbish but simple keypad used in mobiles.
Display: The tellymate! http://www.solarbotics.com/products/50652/ but if it can plug into an old flatscreen monitor, all the better.

There has to be a cheap way of generating images or sending data. Using ethernet and a fast local network, it can control a huge array of devices, and there are new technologies coming out all the time such as 3g modems and IP over electricity.

With the basis of an arduino, or of it's cheaper clones, an open hardware device could be created able to plug into a monitor or a television and use a modern but inexpensive interface such as IR gestures or touchscreen, powered by AA batteries or crank power!

So here are some links I've collected to do with ARM chips and netbooks:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10198879-16.html Ubuntu triumphs in the modern netbook market.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/software-arm-linux.php A linux ARM distro for a specific chip, price TBC...

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/arm-sbc.php $110...

If a workshop was set up to make something that sold for £40 pounds or less, people would buy it. But the sets could take the price down to half of that if it was just simple parts and lots of inventiveness...

A weekend building an arduino based robot

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:18:38 PDT

[The bot itself, looking sombre]

Last month, I went away to Stourbridge, a great centre of technology and robotics in the UK's scenic midlands. Here are some notes, pictures and film from that journey.

(I lied about Stourbridge).

The little train that brought me over from the main rail routes felt like a mix between the Totoro cat train and the slowly chugging train of death that inevitably carries away dead steampunks.

I later learned it had been built with very little money, so the health and safety was very minimal, and it was always breaking down.

But my friend Mat lives on the side of this sleepy town. He said that to one side of his house there was wasteland and empty industrial buildings. The other side, he warned was a land of chavs with blue neon underlit cars, there were also pubs and strip clubs, and lots of nurseries.

For a long time, Mat had been collecting arduinos and sensors of all kinds, hoping for a weekend of calm in which to play with it all. He invited me over to build a sonic robot.

So I had gone over for a weekend of playing with cool tech, which turned out to include generative sound with PD and Max MSP, arduinos, robots, cameras, c++ libraries, and lots of gaming. It's for a show he wants to do next year.

We also talked about the idea of a combined virtual and real tree: perhaps feeding into each other. My tree would live in Second Life or Opensim, and would be made of a robotic avatar, which would talk to it's attachments and generate detachable fruits if it was paid Lindens or fed nice textures. Mat's would live in real life, made of arduinos, servos and LEDs, and might for example produce virtual fruits with a GPS location that you'd need an AR platform to go and find them with.

So Thursday was a quick introduction to the arduino. We did the first hello world tutorial and got out Mat's extensive collection of arduinos, roboduinos, arduino diecimila, cornettos, arduino super maxis, calippos and mars bar ice creams. So after getting one LED's worth of blinking satisfaction, we created two little things out of plastic:

To make these, we sawed a CD box cover in half, attached three ultrasonic oscillators on either side (which were bought for a tenner each at coolcomponents.co.uk). And inside the box covers was a little arduino, controlling it. Our idea was to then wire this up so that music could be played based on it's tactile nature, and based on some 80s experiments with infra-red range finders.

But then we got out PD, and started playing around with that, as well as getting out loads of computer games like Left 4 Dead and Fight Night round 4 - great inspiration for messing with electronics and sound generation.

So next morning came a fun Puredata workshop, downloading it, setting it up on linux, and generating random sounds in our stoic Stourbridge surroundings, a local JD Wetherspoons, to the annoyance and tutting of the locals. I learnt that you can wire up Playstation 3 controllers to PD via USB and they will control anything on the PC. It looks a lot harder to figure out than Max MSP but in it's help files' introduction page it mentions Xenakis and Stockhausen.

And then, after some stir fry, we put together a robot kit, the kind you buy at bookshops or museum shops. This one was from Robot Shop (although I can't find a link to it direct. Mat says it's called the Rover though). We ripped out the frame and the wheel motors and attached them to an arduino. After we'd put 20 tiny bits of metal inside 20 tiny little holes on each track, it was quite easy to get the arduino controlling a single tracked wheel, but there was not enough power to run them both, much less to carry loads of shit around like a robotic pack horse mini me. It would have needed a transistor and a 9v battery, which means a trip to Maplins.

So we sidestepped that whole issue and added the contents of a £50 Edimax webcam and wifi pack to the robot.

[To indoctrinate robots into the human world, it is traditional to filially imprint them with some late night Jonathan Ross]

We removed the webcam from the white side of it's plastic container, displaying it's internal LED(s) as well. This we then taped on to the robot box. and on top of the whole thing went the WIFI router, which was also in the pack from edimax. I soon downloaded an android IP cam app, and had connected to the camera over the wifi router, although being plugged in doesn't make our little robot any better at being autonomous...

But we could add batteries at some point. It needs either a 6v, 9v and 12v battery, or just a rack of AA batteries like a radio controlled car.

[Slightly menacing blue lights, again showing a strange resemblance between television and sound bot]

We also thought of using one of the range finders for it, so that it would have an easy way of avoiding obstacles, but then Mat's games with video to audio pretty much got rid of that need.

And we took loads of photos of the photos it was taking. But to get the camera working on linux, I needed a bit longer, as I had to download all the info and a big 150 meg library to my g1 (As a sign of the times, there was no working internet in the flat, but we both had it via 3g on our phones, which we'd use to transfer files via USB cable).

Meanwhile, I wrote my first C++ library for arduino, stealing shamelessly from a Twitter library, found online, which was able to deal with basic authentication.

So easy to make robots nowadays! I bet in future our robot dolls will be home made too.

I'm back now, a few hours later. We've taken a slight detour with a Max/MSP patch that interprets Mat's Mac's camera and turns it into ostinato piano notes based on how bright each pixel is. After that, Mat enlarged it by 250 times, by taking each pixel in a row and doing this based on the average. It's about as good as the range finders were to begin with. We had loads of fun and made a couple of videos of Mat playing his computer like a piano sampling theremin.

It's also, to my mind, a lot more accessible than a range finder, ultrasonic or IR, because everyone has a camera in the UK and everyone is being videoed or is watching video constantly through the day.

Imagine an installation where you took over all that CCTV in a space, and used it to generate sound based on the people passing through it.

I kept working on my C++ library, and it is now able to log in, request a page, and get an error code of 200 from the camera. Also, you can now install it in the arduino development environment and it will run out of the box, even giving an example. It's not much really, but it was late... And with the pdf of the cgi calls, it will soon be able to deliver lots of info to the arduino based on the images it sees.

Next step will be to get the little camera for the robot sending data back to the Arduino, so that it can pick up visual info and use it to tell where it's going. I had a geeky time messing around with the arduino and it's Ethernet shield, getting it to be a web server and client(ooh, arduino p2p, I count the days until your birth), but unfortunately still not managing to get it to connect to anything useful.

Mat's final vision for the robot is that it is eventually able to find it's way around using the camera, and able to find the most musical place, so that in it's symbiotic relationship with humans, it can deliver pleasurable noises. We also still kept the first basic idea of using our original rangefinder interface, maybe mounted on the robot, or in an area close to it, so as to allow people to play duets with the robot, and find even better noises based on what it finds.

[Our little robot relaxes after a long and arduous hacking session]

How to do memory:
Instead of storing sound samples on an SD card (which could also be good, for obtaining on-board recordings), it could store much more data based on the images it sees, before it turns them into noise. On a 9 hour day, 15 frames a second, so for a minute it would need 900 samples. So for an hour, 54000 samples. it would have 486000 individual samples to take care of. BUT each row of elements has 256 individual integers. So that gives 124 416 000 bits stored in a day, i.e around 15MB.

But that's only if it was gathering this stuff all day: it only needs to gather the stuff it likes(based on an algorithm Mat's got in mind), so maybe a 30 sec vision based sample at most, which would then be stored on the SD card so that it could be played back in combination with other stuff it liked. Samples could maybe be stored in 3 types (Lady Ada's wave shield allows the playing of 3 sounds at a time - enough for percussion, chord/drone and soloist/multiple tones).

Mat's algorithm would do a fitness test:


   is this a C major chord, or a scale, or something I can identify?
       Yes:
           What type is the sound: percussive, slow tone, quick tone?
               store a segment(type)  
           Move slightly forwards or back to try and get nice variations.
       No:
           Turn X degrees left or right.

Arduinos and bits bought from:

Devonrobotics.co.uk, corecomponents.co.uk
Robot shop construction kit: £40 including an arduino!
Lady Ada Wave shield kit: also quite cheap, and including another Arduino.
skpang.co.uk : very cheap bits and oscillators.

Dorkbot's New Hackspace

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:19:15 PDT

Here below you see a miniature, or pocket version of what was recently displayed at a large event in Bath by the newly hacktivised dorkbot bunch, who were given the challenge of providing a musical experience for a tech related arts event. They had to build a smaller version for testing, so they say, or most probably, because they could and because it was fun.

So Dorkbot has finally grown up from being a show and tell of the media, design, internet, engineering, musical and generally creative dork-peoples of Bristol. It has now gained much attention from event organisers and maker faires, as popular electronics has it's second rennaisance in arduinos and strange inventions, and as the closet sound benders of Bristol started messing with all that, so they are booked to play quite a few places, in the sense of course, of playing strange new-millennium unicycles that generate sounds by bending a microprocessor's own vibrations.

Tonight, we plotted the needs for the upcoming (23rd and 24rth October) event in Cardiff, where many a sound unicycle will parade the streets(um, of the venue), a veritable orchestra in fact, for which bass parts are now sought. Here is the shopping list for now:

2 Sunshields for bike wheel (to shade a small section at the top where the optical sensors are)
2 Battery packs for 6AAs
2 Arduinos
Wires
3 or 4* optic sensors
£4 speakers from the garage near John's friend's house
2 power plugs
2 jack sockets.

* The 4, as explained by John Honnibal, was due to the possibility of having an extra track around the side of the disk, which provides the musical score for the device, and to have that synchronise the other notes. This is shown in the first image, at the top of the blog post.

But perhaps I should explain a bit about this space that has been kindly given to Dorkbot by local networkers and community IT group Bristol Wireless, so as to be used as a Hackspace. It's housed at Hamilton House in exotic stokes croft(where from the bar below, a local play takes place each day, next to Bristol Wireless's offices, and so far just an internet connection, some power sockets, and lots of possibly useless, potentially dangerous electronic devices in large plastic containers. Oh and some unicycles.

The idea is to keep it running weekly as a time in which to make stuff, rather than show stuff you've made as with the Pervasive Media Labs sessions. I hope those like me who have never done a day's soldering in their lives will soon learn to count their ohms, tell their resistors from their capacitors, and others will get to work with interesting people who bring their creations to new audiences or new collaborations. But the Dorkbot, mixed media feel is not lost. It's still meant to be a mix of whatever is made by electricity, and I hope the musicians and engineers can be quickly joined by dancers, poets and cooks. (But I do also remember a Cube Cinema based dorkbot where even the electricity rule was broken, and most of the show and tell was about open source cola and distributed apple tree orchards).

So, we now have a bristol hackspace, and lots of things to build each tuesday, for upcoming events, some leaning more towards outreach(such as a busking and empty shop takeover event in late November), others more towards art(such as the Arnolfini's December based IT/hacking programme). I must end with another list, this time of the first hackspace invention ever to be built as a kit and sold. Here are some of the parts that might be required:


In each pack (of a total of maybe 20 packs?):

A small used flyer, or some thin cardboard on which to print a circuit board and on to which the device will be assembled.
1 diode
2 capacitors
2 potentiometers
Chips
etc

1 pack of 20 or 50 plastic parts ziploc bags.

As well as this creation, allowing people to come to a workshop and go home with something interesting, we'll also be on the lookout for some cheap sound making toys from pound stores or toy shops, so as to circuit bend these as well. Meanwhile though, I'll definitely have to learn to solder!

Where's the Salad?

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:47:53 PST

A while ago, I put on an event in which people from Bristol grew and made a salad, based on Alison Knowle's "Proposition No 2":

It was very nice, and I made a preparatory video:

as well as there being a radio interview and a sound art play with radio and some homemade chopping noises(with poet Andres Andwadter), lots of photos of the event itself and some graphics about it. But I want to make this, as well as more audio, this time of the live chopping duet between lollorosso and improvising trio, into a video and tell the story that way. So I'm really sorry, but it's going to take me a while. It was an incredible experience, and thanks to all who came, and to the better food company who gave us loads of tasty tomatos and lettuce. And to everyone else who brought us salad!

A list of future physical/virtual computing arts projects

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:29:55 PDT

I have to write up so much from recent events, but as usual at these times, my head is buzzing with ideas for other stuff to do next (all based on a long weekend of messing with arduinos, robotics, Puredata and Max/MSP), so I thought it best to document that first. So. I would like to make:

An enactment of a score I wrote a long time ago, involving dancers/actors performing with a box, that follows different parameters based on what stage the performance is at. It would be a black box, interacting with the movement and words only through sound. It would be capable of "jamming" or following music in some way or other. (Link suggested by Mat)
A dance based implementation of the MaxMSP script that my friend Mat quickly put together last weekend, which allows webcams to interpret visual data as audio samples(more on that in the next post). I want to invite a duet of dancers to perform with this webcam audio, in December, but mostly scriptless, just a result of trying things out with the kit and seeing what shapes to pull so the sounds are better!
An outdoors sound object capable of sensing it's environment (possibly via sensors able to see light and soil moisture, so a bit like a plant again). It would turn those senses into audio. I would program it with my own samples and prototype it with PD, though so it would sound somehow like my own thing. The main part of it would be that it could play a morning raga: if it's dark, play a generative solo sound. As sound increases, find a melody and vary it, keeping the main bit for later. Percussion joins in when light reaches a certain moment, and follows warmth or moisture. I've got most of the bits of this. I'm wondering how to keep it safe out there in the rain and damp all the time though. And I want to get it solar panels and make it self sufficient, or even read more data from that into music as well!
An exhibition, soon, of the musical robot we prototyped and got started this weekend (looking for venues at the moment).
The two trees, from the previous post. This will hopefully debut on Burning Man's Second Life incarnation, Burning Life.
Maybe in future, a watcher system to protect plants against night time garden pests. It would have a wire going into each plant pot. It would use the noted aversion that slugs and snails have to small electrical charges (this is why they don't like copper), together with a motion sensor or some other sensors, to (gently) zap them whenever they come by. The natural extension of this would of course be a mobile robot that had all these things in it, and a good way of finding it's way around the garden.

So some of these are very real and coming soon if not here already. The Burning Life land grab is tonight (3am! late night tonight for me then) for example, but other things I just want to note down for the future...

A tree spirit for Opensim / Burning Life

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:04:13 PDT

I want to make a self replicating distributed bot + attachment system, which is coupled with a physical computing version of itself which my friend Mat Dalgliesh is making as a physical creation.

Here is the spec:

The tree idea is a reflection of a physical computing tree, created using arduinos, sensors and motors.

Leaves are attachments with a built in fall script. When they fall, they slowly degrade, becoming darker until they become a particle effect and delete themselves. New leaves take donations from users. If they get donations, they grow bigger and live longer. They pass this donation to the trunk who divides it around the rest of the plant.

Here is a little bit of a proto-leafgen script:

// Rez an object on touch, with relative position, rotation, and velocity all described in the rezzing prim's coordinate system.
string object = "Leaf"; // Name of object in inventory
vector relativePosOffset = <2.0,>; // "Forward" and a little "above" this prim
vector relativeVel = <1.0,>; // Traveling in this prim's "forward" direction at 1m/s
rotation relativeRot = <0.707107,>; // Rotated 90 degrees on the x-axis compared to this prim
integer startParam = 10;



default {

state_entry() {
    vector myPos = llGetPos();
    rotation myRot = llGetRot();

    vector rezPos = myPos+relativePosOffset*myRot;
    vector rezVel = relativeVel*myRot;
    rotation rezRot = relativeRot*myRot;
llSetObjectName("Leaf");
    llRezObject(object, rezPos, rezVel, rezRot, startParam);
  }

touch_start(integer num_detected) {
  llRequestPermissions(llDetectedKey(0), PERMISSION_ATTACH);
}

run_time_permissions(integer perm) {
  if (perm & PERMISSION_ATTACH)  {
      llAttachToAvatar(ATTACH_RHAND);
  }
}

}

Fruits are controlled by all the other parts: they accumulate currency, and can spawn more of themselves when small. When big, they have a drop script. It becomes a little ball that gives something nice, like textures, or sim currency when picked. Just before it drops, it transfers any remaining goodness inside it to the trunk

The trunks are all bot avatars, run after being prepared by humans. Each time the tree needs to grow by another bit, another avatar is needed to be attached to a linking attachment. By use of animations, they could even be intertwined with each other. It uses currency to upload textures of it's older self - used in all other parts. If restarted, the bot scripts will start from seedling.

The avatar is heavily made up: it will have trunk and root- like attachments. sounds and animations, and then generators for the fruits and leaves, It is a bot, communicating with the attachments it wears via hidden channels. Maybe that's how a tree spirit should.

Roots are born when the tree is on some land. They could be non physical and locked to a place, so they function as an anchor. It can be engineered that only way it could be moved would be by the addition to the tree of a rooting script, temporarily making the tree physical. Not sure if these will be needed really though.

To kill it, because it can respawn trunks which automatically wear leaves and accumulate money, you would have to ddos all the bots that run it, and they can be connecting from different servers, which could make it quite a resilient little plant.

So this is an opensource project at the moment. It is a cross between content, character design ecology and commerce. It should be fun! Let me know if you'd like to be involved!

A quick look at Second Life and Opensim

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:56:54 PDT

I just wrote this blog post as a generic look at the history and uses of virtual worlds, with focus mostly on SL, but I'm about to change it drastically to just be about SL and it's uses to most of the clients we have at work - mostly quangos, charitable organisations and meta-academic groups. Meanwhile, here is it's full original and sometimes unfinished text

I Robot

These days I have been mostly building some robots. To be precise, I am making a few Victorians, some roman slaves, and a roman tour guide and host. They will be there to welcome visitors, and to provide entertaining commentaries as a backdrop to a historical reconstruction. But these are not your "ordinary" robots, made of metal and silicon: they will live their slightly repetitive existences only within the confines of the Second Life virtual world.

The project I'm working on uses this 3d environment to recreate a Victorian model of an earlier Roman building - the Pompeii Court, which was in turn, reconstructed as part of the original Sydenham Crystal Palace exhibition in the 1850s.

Many academic institutions have used Second Life for similar purposes - to bring to life lost buildings in architectural or design projects, as a way to show these places and buildings to students and visitors.

So what is Second Life again?

Second Life, like many other MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games or Environments), is a direct descendant of the text based "Dungeon" software that became popular in the late 80s and 90s, around the time when the Internet first came into popular use. These were primarily games, but also allowed users to socialise and sometimes even to build new aspects of this textual environment.

Second life, first published by Linden Labs in 2002, offers similar functionality: you can send messages, chat, or send instant messages to other players, as you would in a social network environment such as Facebook, but with the difference that this would take place in a rich 3d world, complete with sounds, animations, video and sometimes even the real voices of the other users. The vast majority of what you can find inside Second Life has been built by the same users who frequent it.

To have a first look, just go to https://join.secondlife.com/ and follow the instructions you will find there.

A useful tip is to remember to capitalise the first letter of your new avatar's name, as the automatically generated second name will also be automatically capitalised. Once you have selected a pre-built avatar and filled in some details, you will be able to download the client software and get inside second life's "grid" (the collection of computers running second life's server software, which combine to produce second life's "world").

Why would I want to use it?

Linden Labs' business oriented web site lists the main ways companies are working in Second Life today. Above all, it is used as a virtual meeting place, allowing shared virtual spaces, where employees can discuss issues within a traditional meeting or conference framework, or in small groups anonymously or informally. Because Second Life provides powerful and easy to use 3d building tools, it is also employed in the field of design and architecture for collaborative building, or to simulate dangerous or far away environments for training purposes, as well as to view 3d prototypes that might otherwise take days to produce off-line.

There are many ways of creating game areas, or so-called "Interative advertising" so that concepts can become immersive for users or more entertaining to learn about, Technology moves quickly however, and some companies initially doing this in Second Life have since found it easier to use bespoke virtual environments, and some have been recently developing their own solutions.

Here are some examples of how different types of company might use Second Life:

A health company recently used Second Life for informal workplace talks on health. One organiser was quoted as saying "“Normally you would rarely tell your colleagues about your health concerns, but here with some level of anonymity, people open up”.
Late last year, IBM held a Conference using various teleconferencing technologies, including use of Second Life for 200 people, involving three keynote speeches and 37 breakout sessions.
Imperial College London are building a "Virtual Hospital" within a private area of a virtual postgraduate medical school in SciLands, a dedicated science and technology Second Life continent populated by universities, government agencies and museums.
A company named Encitra is using Second Life as a platform to do real life urban planning.

The Virtual Economy

One major aspect across many online virtual worlds, is the fact that these worlds have their own currencies and economies that interact with the real world. As players of virtual games increase their abilities, complete quests and acquire items, they are able to trade these in various currencies. Recently, the Chinese government limited the practice of "Gold Farming" where players of the more game oriented virtual worlds would pay low-skilled game characters to gain points or items for them. In many cases these tasks were carried out in sweatshop-like working conditions.

In the online space trading world of Eve Online however, an economist has been hired to oversee the in-world currency, so as to keep it interesting and balanced. Quarterly blog reports are highly awaited by players, as accountants might await the reading of the UK budget. There are a number of differences from real world economics, mostly due to the speed at which transactions occur, and to the fact that they can all be recorded by the underlying software, but this only makes it easier to construct and run economics simulations.

Other uses

A lot of the most interesting functionality of virtual worlds is still to come. As major Virtual World proponent, Dr Crista Lopes, Associate Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, remarked, "My attraction to SL in particular, in contrast to my relative indifference to MMORPGs in general, was its potential to become more like the web; to mature and become a platform for business and life in general". So a good reason to be aware of these environments is that they stand a good chance of becoming a lot more widespread.

Within the mobile software market for example, as GPS, fast internet and tilt sensors reach wider audiences, there is a big pull towards so called Augmented Reality software - where you can hold a device up in a city centre or library for example, and see data about that place - bus times, friends in the area or books about a certain subject. Software such as Google Earth has frequently been seen as a type of virtual world, and Second Life itself has been a source of experimentation in "Civic Mirror worlds": environments that map or mimic real world areas, allowing users to visit places that would be difficult or impossible to do in real life.

In this way, today's 3d environments are the first step towards a convergence of real and data-augmented environments, with the benefit of being easy to get involved in, especially for younger or less technically oriented users.

An alternate pull is away from reality, and I've mentioned the use of these worlds as a way for people to express themselves informally and anonymously or in role play. For the majority of users of Second Life today, their avatars - virtual personae - do not seek to represent their real life selves. Instead they use the environment as a vehicle to free themselves from their physical limitations, to fly, dance, fit into all kinds of clothes or appearances and in this way to socialise with people they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

A case looked at in detail in the book "Second Lives" by Tim Guest is a workshop consisting of physically and mentally disabled patients, who choose one of several identities, and together with a carer on a computer console, all participate in a shared identity, making decisions as a group as to what that character will do in any particular session.

Problems and alternatives

There are many competitors to Second Life currently under development. An important counterpart is Open Simulator, an open source world that is fully compatible with Second Life. It allows would be world builders to download and host a world of their making from their own computers or hosting providers, in the same way that a modern website is served to users. This gets past a lot of Second Life's drawbacks, such as those evidenced by Dr Nic Earle of the Sydenham Crystal Palace project:

Second Life servers may be closed for maintenance when their US based audience is sleeping - which in the UK may be right in the middle of a session or in class!

The Second Life client software may require an update at any time (also chosen by Linden Labs), and won't allow access to the world until this is done. Again, this can be a huge problem if there is limited time in which to show a simulation to a group.

Due to issues with content restrictions, there are actually two Second Life grids: a "teen grid" which is PG only and for users aged 13-17, and a separate adult grid. This can create lots of problems in undergraduate classes, where some students will still be too young to enter the adult version.

Price: The rental costs of an island or parcel of Second Life with content editing permission is on the increase. Open Simulator on the other hand can be run on most computers, and hosting can be very cheap.

Open Simulator is not without it's problems: long term Second Life users will find it's functionality lacking, but other virtual environments are quickly stepping up to offer alternatives. It is now possible to use flash based software such as Paper Vision to provide a 3d environment accessible directly via a browser and without requiring software downloads.

Virtual worlds and their underlying technologies are always advancing. With the advent of controller-less devices, we will see - at first in gaming, but ultimately across many aspects of computer use - much simpler, more interactive and immersive ways of communicating and of representing real or imagined environments, and at a far lower cost to the pocket and to the world than both physical travel, and video based teleconferencing.

Here is a promotional video for the next version of Microsoft's X-Box 360 game console - showing many of these possibilities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U

ILRT offers Open Simulator hosting and a selection of Second Life based services.

2 weeks in - a google phone review

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:02:05 PDT

So I was at a funeral 2 weeks ago, and feeling pretty sad and in need of distraction. Also while at the funeral, my phone broke, so the next day I went down the road and spent a good hour telling all my life and family data to the sales guy, who then signed my life off in blood for the next 18 months on this planet. Midlife crisis?

T-Mobile says it's £30 a month for a famous "Google Phone" or G1, but actually this works out at 45 for most people if you throw in the data plan (which for a G1 makes little sense without), and the 10 pound insurance the phone shop was very very into flogging to me. I declined, saying they should seek alternate revenue than insurance - I see that as a dead market in these times. They should concentrate on providing services like repair or home made application development. Much more money in that, and value to building a community of phone users around a shop etc etc... But I didn't waste too much time telling him that.

Rooting it up

After 2 weeks using this, I've found out that it really makes sense to "root" it. This is UNIX speak for gaining all the administrative privileges to the backbone of the phone - a task usually reserved for ultra geeks, but something you can also do for a fee nowadays in most phone repair shops. T-Mobile have been very nice with this so far, and it looks like rooting doesn't invalidate your warranty, unlike Apple, which has sometimes resorted to "bricking" people's iPhones when they tampered similarly with them. As various forums list - the main benefit is you can "tether" your phone to your PC - and use it's unlimited data plan instead of shelling out on a virgin media plan (yet another contract with the monthly fees devil). Another reason is that after just 4 days of downloading various free apps from the android market, my phone was packed full and complaining about lack of space. So rooting also helps here because you can then install applications on the 2GB SD card that comes with the T-Mobile package.

On the Case

Another mishap on the journey is that as we were arriving in Bristol from the funeral, my daughter had a stomach upset, all over the bus, and somewhere in there was the phone's slender sock that had also come with the t-mobile package. So it's still there somewhere, and as we cleaned the seat and gathered belongings, I somehow lost it. But a plethora of much more usable cases already exist - some simple, plastic and protective, others leather and very business-like, but few that actually fit around the phone and it's opening keyboard, protecting the big touch screen as needed, when in the hands of someone like me, who invariably will drop or mess up a phone if left long enough with it.

Film Programming

Then it was Easter, and one night I realised it was probably my only available night to actually get into some android programming. After about 3 hours faffing and reading, downloading eclipse and looking up existing android code from the various open source app projects on code.google.com, I managed to produce a Maya Deren application. All it does is show a picture, and a bit of text, and it's little more than a hello world app - although I see a vague market for it - a personalised obituary service. But in the spirit of Ms Deren and her early experiments with film, I plan to continue by using the camera preview API - a basic way of showing video and related effects on the phone, before the new version of android comes out - with much improved video recording and display capabilities.

Programming was much like modern web design and programming: the layout was held in XML files, and the programming code separate, and even the code itself, when working with the android API, is incredibly high level, making it easy to, for example, save some data to a database, take a picture from the camera or choose a colour from a colour picker and feed the result back in to a function in just a couple of lines of code. This is probably why the android application landscape today is very similar to pre-1995 java applets - where you could typically wait 15 minutes for someone's homepage to download a gnome picking it's nose.

Zombie Borg Circus

There are some brilliantly geeky applications on the market. Firstly, the ones that let you play games - I wish other people I knew had this phone so we could all go out and play Zombie Run for example - brilliantly simple: it tracks your location and some (hopefully) imaginary zombies on a google map and you have to outrun them around the town... Would be good in connection with the AK-47 App...

The creator of Audacity now works for Google, which can account for the brilliance of the ringdroid application: it can record any sound - from the phone's microphone or anything being played from inside another application. So I can record Last FM streams for example, or voice diaries/comments, and chop them up to size for use as ringtones or to export from the SD onto other media. Sadly though, no improvements have been made to this since October.

My daughter (the one with the stomach upset, much better now thanks) really likes the speaking capabilites of the phone. A linux text-to-voice library was ported to the android platform some time last year, and now there are reams of applications using it. In the one she uses, she can type a word, and it will speak it back to her. A variant does this in other languages too. This keeps her amused for many fruitful 30 minute periods, only slightly alarming when she waves it around with glee from the absurdly robotic pronounciations.

But a more advanced use of this TTL library is certainly the "The vOICe" application - I have no idea where or why this came about, but it is billed as an "augmented reality application for the visually impaired" and it converts input from the phone's camera, into sound, as well as speaking out GPS locations and other robotic data. Now I know what to choose as an eye implant if the world of City of Lost Children ever comes together or the borg have to cut back in the face of the intergalactic credit crunch. It is the single most geeky application I have ever seen in my life.

I also found so many comics. It looks like a big screen touchscreen phone may be the short form media place of choice in future. Some comics incorporate simple animations and sound to replace talk bubbles, others are just a slideshow of images scanned from print based comics, but all of them allow you to read the first issue for free, and charge you for the next one. All but one, a CC licensed remix of a Cory Doctorow story, which could be the future of CC licensed media... If anyone has a comic in mind, I'll be happy to score it with my local improvising orchestra and release it as CC for you! Enquire within: http://orchestra.cubecinema.com

Soundcasting

So where next with android? First step will be rooting it, installing the next version of it's SDK and firmware when it's (imminently) released, and then getting to work on a soundcasting application - this is so that when you are walking around and hear nice sounds you want to share (the birds in the park, your footsteps in the snow), you can stream them out to a slightly annoyed audience as you would a twitter message, but in the form of background or unintended noise only. Much more like the twitter of real birds.

Oh, one gripe with the phone. It's quite hard to actually figure out how to make calls!! A couple of times in the first week I had the phone, I couldn't get apps to close in time to make important calls, but now I'm getting the hang of the idea that you can't ever actually close applications - they just go to the background and maybe die later if the phone things they aren't doing anything useful. Also the touch screen system, whereby a different function is called if you press for a bit longer, rather than a single tap, was hard to get used to, a bit like learning to click the blue underlined words if it's your first time on the web. Battery usage varies wildly depending on what apps are running or services you are using (GPS is a good way to drain it all in an hour).

And the whole UI sometimes feels like a messily put together collection of bits and pieces - for example it should be easy for it to pick up phone numbers in any application and have a standard list of things to do with them - save to contacts, call, sms etc - but actually this kind of thing is not yet there. So let's say, for an IT person like me, it's great, and a really addictive gadget to have, but it's really not grandma-ready yet.

Sustainable Communities Bill

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:06:08 PDT

Here is my submission to the sustainable communities bill call for suggestions. I hope that others feel motivated to publish their SCB suggestions. I think there's a huge lack of dialogue in the current process, and the more we share what we know the more we can counter this

-- 0 --

Walking through Bristol in mid recession, there are many many more empty properties as businesses close, homes are repossessed and places become derelict. This reminds me of what happened during the Great Depression in the US: Thousands of properties lying empty while people are homeless or crammed in social housing, or having to endure various hardships due to living arrangements. This conundrum led to considerable social unrest both then and in the recession of the 70s.

To solve this problem some turn to squatting, or artists sometimes ask administrators of empty properties for their temporary use for exhibitions, and many positive results have come from this. The arts/community group Artspace/Lifespace has made many steps forward with this in Bristol, with it's use of the Pro Cathedral and now the various "Bridewell" police stations as temporary arts venues before their redevelopment as housing projects. Apart from giving these places free publicity, they also cleaned out the properties and maintained them while occupying them.

I believe a part of this success has been the empty buildings tax which the owners of these buildings would have been charged had their buildings sat empty.

I'm not aware of what legislation stops there being a general purpose way of facilitating temporary use agreements with a property's administrator. I am sure however that there is much legislation that gets in the way of this.

Uses need not purely be artistic. Any positive community uses such as short term housing, shops, and businesses can help a positive future for the community around it. I believe any social, cultural, business or environmental purpose could be included within this scheme, thus leading also to many low cost business models - such as food preparation "cafes" in busy central streets, voluntary organisations or workers cooperatives producing what we no longer afford to import, and a homeless population not driven to rioting or crime due to lack of community or opportunities around them. Agreements could vary depending on the nature of the project (such as increasing rent as business picks up), some part of building's insurance could be covered as part of the agreement, and much of this could be paid for by a higher tax on these empty premises, and by the opportunity cost of leaving those buildings empty. I would ask that this agreement be done as an open process, consulting with local residents as is usually done for a planning permission application, not only to grant the use, but to ask for suggestions, contributions and involvement (for example, in time or money) towards the scheme.

I am aware that the SCA as it stands does not have space for dialogue once this suggestion is sent, but I am happy to do so informally or to travel wherever possible and present further documents or clarification further along the line. I have written this without contacting the groups mentioned in 10., but will endeavour to do so and that they can submit similar proposals.

Point 9: I don't know if these come under "local service providers":

ArtSpace/LifeSpace: http://artspacelifespace.purplecloud.net/index.php/developers
Community groups such as the PRSC in Stokes Croft - which has done lots of work with the homeless population of that area.
Workers cooperatives in Bristol - the CDA will know who to contact.

--0--

Next suggestion:
Volunteer waiver of unpicked food prices. Under this agreement, farmers unable to raise money for distribution, and where sale price doesn't meet production costs, allow city people to come and take produce. Perhaps in exchange for city items or training. Groups transporting large amounts of produce could then be allowed to distribute it.

"The farmers are being pauperized by the poverty of the industrial population and the industrial population is being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other."

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/05/the-great-depression-the-credit-crisis-and-the-future-of-your-food/