someone who's doing some things
At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.
After a not bad wait at all my new Pebble Time smartwatch has arrived. So now I’m experimenting with it to see what it can do and what I can get done with it. That’s going to take a little while I should think, but as I decided to go with the Pebble Time just before the Apple Watch was announced and took centre stage I want to see how much I can get done with the new Pebble.
So expect updates on this over the coming weeks …
I went to a workshop today on weaving with conductive thread. Not something I’ve done a lot of before, but something I’ve had a previous taste of when I did a workshop of making interactive clothes. However, I’ve never done anything with weaving at all, but it always seemed like a fun thing to try.
So the idea was to weave something small and introduce a couple of conductive thread elements in that could be attached to a microcontroller board like a TouchBoard. In fact, it was a TouchBoard in this instance and that was very straightforward to use as it is nice and easy to connect up.
Well the weaving was ok, in fact easier than I expected although I made a few mistakes. Introducing the conductive thread was simple enough, and as you can see I managed to create a little piece of stuff at the end of it. It worked too. I connected it up to the TouchBoard and it worked a treat. In fact, when I got home I connected it to my Ototo board and that was fine too.
So what’s next? I’m not sure actually. I don’t know quite how I’ll take this forward if at all. There are a few possible applications to it, a few ideas bubbling around, but I need to think about them a bit more first.
Let’s see what happens.
The new SoundLab site and guide is up now. It’s been a long time coming and it looks great. I hope that it will make a difference to organisations and groups and that it’ll be a useful resource. I can safely say that I had more fun from being a part of SoundLab than most other work I’ve been involved with.
Hopefully I won’t have too long to wait until it arrives, although it does have a fair distance to travel. I’m really interested in seeing how it compares to the original Pebble smartwatch and what sort of functionality I can get out of it compared to the Apple Watch. Not that I have an Apple Watch, but it’ll be interesting nevertheless.
I also want to see how it works with both iOS and Android and work out what’s best and where the most interesting and useful interactions come from. So expect Pebble Time posts in the coming weeks.
I really like the Ototo board from Dentaku. It’s fun for trying things out and experimenting with ideas. I’ve just bought three new sensors for it, an additional light sensor, a pressure / force sensor, and a ribbon sensor. They’re all very nicely made and to the same high standard as the ones I already have, and, they’ve already been very useful.
But using the board has made me start to think about other aspects of the board. In the Dentaku faq about Ototo it mentions that they’re looking into a way of changing the sounds on the board itself. I think that this would be very useful indeed, as would being able to map the different sensor inputs on any given sound as well. I think it could be done with a simple app either for the desktop of mobile, but it would make the board a lot more useful.
I only got to try this out for the first time the other day but it is pretty amazing. Not easy to fly though. Not easy at all, but fun. I really underestimated just how much space is needed to fly this thing. You need a fairly large flat park and you need a very windless day to do it too. Even the slightest gust of wind can take the thing as it’s so light.
The app is amazing though. You get real control with it. The only thing I’d have liked is a front facing camera on the airplane which sends real time footage back to the app. That would have been so cool. Even so it’s loads of fun to play around with, and when the wind dies down a bit I’ll get another chance to mess around with it.
What a lovely thing. I’m so glad that I kickstarted it. I’ve been using it quite a bit recently and it’s great for just making interesting contraptions, and for tinkering, but best of all for having fun.
What else is there?
It’s a shame what’s been happening with Arduino and their legal battles. Not a pleasant thing at all. However, it’s good to see a new brand emerge that’ll hopefully establish itself as the number one name in DIY boards.
Go for it Arduino!
But I have to ask why? It isn’t like there’s anything you can do with a ZX81 that I can’t do elsewhere, and so I constantly battle with myself, sometimes wanting to get one, and other times deciding that it really is a bad idea and I just wouldn’t use it, and that is really a lot closer to the truth as that happens with stuff I buy, I’m sorry to say.
I also sometimes think about some of the things I could do with one, and then try and use an emulator, and don’t really get into that and that also tells me that getting an actual ZX81 would be a bad idea. Even though I think they’re awesome.
I remember seeing Chirp.io back at a Music Tech Fest when it was at Ravensbourne college. It was an interesting idea and I was quite curious about it, but I wasn’t sure how I would use it and how it could be useful. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes it takes a while for things to find a place in my world and I like stuff to be actually useful to me.
So when I found that Chirp.io was equity funding on Crowdcube I thought I’d take a look. At the same time they’re expanding chirp into the IoT world with an SDK and Arduino code. It’s getting interesting now. Also, they’ve just announced a Chrome extension, which could be fun.
I wonder where they’ll go next.
I am Ashley Elsdon 