I give you all a little bit of trams, it did not work so good though, but still.
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Vacation
I’m on vacation.
It’s nice.
I’m sitting in the shade, typing on my laptop, listening to the songs entering the jazzhole compo, watching the kids playing with (not in,as much) the pool.
It might have been a bad decision putting it next to the swings.
I’ve just bought a lot of clear plastic boxes so I can organize my workroom a bit better, and finish that sound-wall.
But now it’s so nice out, I’ll just sit here enjoying life.
Payback of being nice to random strangers on teh internets.
Two or three years ago when I just made my moanonme device and it got loads of attention I recieved a strange email with the title “LED project for you?”. This was a guy from Australia living in England that wanted to do some lead stuff for his band. Se his band was just 2 persons (Bass and Guitar) and a drum machine. And he wanted to make the drums to be a larger part of their stage presence by blinking with VU-meters.
Since Aaron turned out to be really nice in his emails and I really did not have to do more then think of solutions to his problem I was helped out as good as I could. We threw a few ideas back and forth, and I think it was mine that he finally made.
Often when you do this kind of thing, nothing happens afterward. I’ve helped people with “personal art projects”, coding, electronics, input on music, etc etc. Often this does not amount to anything. Nothing is produced and there is nothing to show. This is ok, not every project succeds. Failing and or abandoning them is also ok.
I emailed Aaron once half a year after he told me he was finished asking for a video or image, he didn’t have one (yet), and I forgot all about it until the Sunday before last when he sent me an email. It had the same title, so he obviously replied to our old thread, I had to dig into memory (and look into the old discussion in the email) to remember what it was all about. The first sentences of the email was Aaron telling me that he hadn’t have had the time to film the device yet.
BUT they where going to play in Malmö Tuesday night and if I lived there he would put me on the guest list and I could check it out for myself. I work in Malmö, so I told him that I would be there. Tuesday came along and I went to see Civil Civic and the device I helped engineer. It was awesome. The music was great, chatting with Aaron afterward was also great.
Best of all was the feeling I had, sometimes helping ppl on the internet pays of, and when it does it’s a great feeling.
So go check out Civil Civic if you have a chance, at least on the internets, maybe there will be a video of the device sometimes. I took some pictures, but I like the elusive feel of it not being documented or put on the net.
LazerDirector
So here is my simple little processing sketch that made all the nice circles.
Here is the source and example in a nice zipfile: LazerDirector
And here is the source, copy pasted, nice!
/* Lazor Director is a processing.org sketch to make halftone images into svg files that can be sent to a laser-cutter service, examples of these are http://www.cutyourway.com/ http://ponoko.com/ and http://www.1scale1.com/ Please note that the processing image is not a real representation of how the svg looks, the svg has far better resolution */ PrintWriter output; // We use this to pritnt the svg file PImage photo; //the original image that we want to convert to halftoneish svg void setup() { smooth(); //we want the smoothest possible edges in the image we see, can be removed for speed photo = loadImage("lobo.png"); //input image, that is, here is where you load what you want to halftone-hole (make sure it has the same size as the svg file output(se further down)) size((int)(photo.width), (int)(photo.height)); //change processings window output widht and height output = createWriter("output.svg"); background(0); //setting the background to black, this is because I have black pastic to cut out from, add here your materials color /*this is the header of the svg file. , 1080*1080 is 12"*12" (according to inkscape) */ output.println(""); output.println(""); //1080 * 1080 is 12"x12" output.println(" Test"); output.println(""); output.println(" Layer 1"); drawCircles2(photo, 12); //the function that does the finding of the circles, second parameter is how large chunks (in pixels)it shall search in. output.println(""); output.println(""); save("output.png"); output.flush(); output.close(); } void draw() { //nothing to do here } void drawCircles2(PImage photo, int spacing) { for(int j = 0; j < photo.height; j+=spacing) //looping through the image, in squares of { for(int i = 0; i < photo.width; i+=spacing) { PImage segment = photo.get(i, j, spacing, spacing); //cuting out a whole float brighnezz = getAreaBrightness(segment); //meassuring the brighness float cSize =( brighnezz/51.2); //adjusting the size of the whole depending on the brightnezz if(cSize >1.5) //to small holes, we dont care about (was 0.5 in the one I show over at: { fill(255); //white here because I want to get a feel for how it would look if added light behind stroke(255); //same here /*writing the svg information to file */ output.println(" +cSize+"\" cy=\""+j+"\" cx=\""+i+"\"/> "); /* drawing preview on screen */ ellipse(i, j,cSize, cSize); } } } } int getAreaBrightness(PImage area) { int bval = 0, count = 1; for(int i = 0; i < area.width; i++) { for(int j = 0; j < area.height; j++) { color check = area.get(i, j); bval += brightness(check); //thank you processign for having all the dedious task's as functions! count++; } } return (int)(bval/count); }
So yeah, Lasercutting things.
I’ve been bisy as of late, sorry about that. Android Live Wallpaper competition at work. Making games and moustache applications with Staffan, kid’s starting their summer holiday’s. But enough of that.
As you know, I’ve been dabbling with lasercutting and I’ve recived my Lobo circled test. So here are a few pictures:
Tomorrow I’m going to post the processing.org script I used to convert the image to svg!