Rob Mug Box

Here’s a little piece that Kyle and I put together last year, as a response to Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi project.

The Rob/Mug Box tracks a target’s geolocation data: when the box is within range of that person, “mug” lights up; and when the box is near that person’s home, “rob” lights up. This is the first in a series of boxes designed to provide binary feedback about our complicated world.

As our first target, we chose Wafaa Bilal. In December 2010 Wafaa Bilal started a year long performance called “The 3rd I” where he broadcast one photo every minute from a camera on the back of his head. 3rdi.me/ Each photo is geotagged, so we scraped this data and fed it to the Rob/Mug Box. In this video, recorded summer 2011, our agent tracked down Wafaa in a local cafe and followed him home.

The source code is of course on Github.

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StickyMan, a thought experiment in manipulating gravity

I developed StickyMan (source here ), a quickie game idea during the Baltimore Hackathon a few months ago. The question I wanted to answer was, “What if Lode Runner got stuck in an Escher painting?”. The idea is that gravity is relative, and every time you hit a wall, that wall becomes the ground. I had fun fudging with the transforms until it more or less functioned. If I had more time, the plan was to make it so that you had to use gravity to indirectly manipulate different colored boxes into different holes, as if you were in charge of the shipping department for MC Escher.

More explanation after the break. Continue reading

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Making gradients in Processing using OpenGL

I’ve been working on a display project using Processing, and wanted to add some linear gradients and fuzzed edges to make the display look a bit nicer. The example linear and radial gradient functions work ok, but are somewhat processor intensive, so I wanted to find a better way to achieve the same effect.
Continue reading

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Turn a Chumby into a tiny internet kiosk

In a quest to earn a fine bottle of scotch (and help my friend Marty out with a project), I modified the Chumby web browser to be a full-screen kiosk. To make it work, just grab this file, unzip the contents into a usb stick or SD card, place the card in your Insignia, and reboot. You can change the URL that it loads by modifying the file debugchumby (use your desktop computer, the Chumby doesn’t seem to like writing to USB).

This can be used to make nice interfaces for the Chumby without having to learn flash or compile anything. Simply make a nice whiz-bang HTML page, and you should be good to go!

Source code for this super simple browser is here. Note that this is for the 8″ Insignia Infocast branded machine. You can probably get it to work with the other Chumbys, but will need to recompile. Have fun!

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The One-Hour Coasterbot

Gareth just finished a Make: Projects version of the one-hour coasterbot build that I created for a contest last year. Thanks, Gareth!

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Interview at Robots Dreams

Lem Fugitt from Robots Dreams stopped by the Botcave and interviewed me. We also talked about MakerBot:

Thanks, Lem!

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Salt & Pepper Creature (Work in Progress)

I’m working on a three part, printable model (top, bottom, actuator arm) that can be made into a little electronic puppet by adding a cheap servo and snapping it together. It’s an adaptation of DesignGlut’s Salt and Pepper Shakers. Model files coming when I get back to my other computer.

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