Some of my news
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Let's get ghetto [Arduino styleee]
Sept. 28, 2009
Over the weekend I went to an 80s themed fancy dress party. A few days before I visited Affleck's Palace in Manchester for some inspiration and saw some old skool ghetto blasters. I thought it'd be brilliant to buy one and go as a Beastie Boy, but these things were expensive. Especially the one with loads of flashing LEDs! I thought "Hang on, I can hack one together using my Arduino kit, and a cardboard box!".
So I did.
There's a really rough and ready tutorial over at Instructables and a photo album on Facebook. The code is on Github, and whilst not brilliant, does the job. Oh, there's also a video on Vimeo (it's also embedded below).
Lick of Paint
Aug. 28, 2009
Well ... less a lick of paint and more a rebuilding of the wall really.
I've recently been rewriting this site to use a custom blogging/CMS system written from scratch using Django. It is noway near complete, but I wanted to put something live so I felt like I was making progress. Release early, release often an' all that.
This is a work in progress.
I'm going to be implementing tags, search, comments and the like soon. And sort out the portfolio and projects pages so they have more content and look nicer.
I've pulled some of the old blog posts out of Google's cache so there is something to look at here! Have a look round and give me some feedback if you feel inclined.
Love,
Ben.Categories: News
Geek Love!
Feb. 14, 2009
Happy (Saint) Valentine's Day!
Today I very quickly sketched an animated Valentine's card in Processing :-). The hearts jiggle about in a heart shape and return home only to jiggle about some more every 15 seconds or so.
Click the heart to start the animation.
Categories: Fun, Processing
Dancing Circles
Oct. 13, 2008
OK, it's finally time to show my circles on here. I've tried and tried to make a video of them but the each frame render takes too much time and the video ends up being longer that the actual time I was recording for.
There are workarounds but I like playing the thing "live" - pressing buttons to move the circles about. There are a few photos in my Flickr Processing set.
So .. if you can be bothered there is a 30MB download. It's because Sonia likes Wav files and dislikes MP3s. Like I say, I wanted to stick a video on Vimeo but that was proving a pain. Each circle represents an "FFT bin" and the diameter its level.
Download:
The intention is that the user controls the visualization. Push the circles to the bottom for the quite bits, then explode them up when the music kicks in ... whatever. There's a bug I left in deliberately: after using the hard left or right controls pressing the space bar makes the circles move along the X axis quickly, then the Y axis slowly. It's kinda nice. If it annoys you reset the visualization (see controls below).
Controls (all lower case):
- wasd - hard UP, LEFT, DOWN, RIGHT
- Space - move to random location
- m - move to centre of window
- c - randomize colours
- i - reset circle positions, movement speeds and randomize colours
- r - circles run away from the mouse
- Arrow keys - nudge circles
- q - quit
Source code, created by Processing mangling my source into Java is provided in the download. It's not particularly neat code, but this didn't take particularly long to make!
Take it easy.
Categories: Fun, Processing, Visualization
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