Shortly after moving up to Nottingham I began working with Mat Trivett and Mike Golembewski to set up an open, collaborative collective of creative practitioners in Nottingham. We called it LAB, and we’ve just confirmed our first in a series of workshops based around open source prototyping and collaborative practice:

LAB #1: Processing Workshop – March 16th. 7-10 pm at The Orange Tree (Map).

This’ll be an intro to the Processing development enviroment and programming language. If you’re interested in coming along, you’ll need to sign up, and the link to the registration form can be found in the event post. The reason for this is so that we can get an idea of who’s coming and tailor the workshops appropriately.

We’re in the process of confirming dates for the next two sessions, but the second will be an Arduino workshop, and the third will be a putting-what-you’ve-learned-into-practice project workshop. If you are interested in coming along to either of these you can sign up to the LAB mailing list and we’ll keep you posted, or just keep an eye on the blog for further announcements. Alternatively, if you’re interested in working with us, do feel free to get in touch.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that we won’t be entirely focussed on digital or electronic things. That’s just what we’re kicking of with, so stand by for crocheting and ice-sculpting workshops. Or something.

Exciting times!

The other day, as a way of avoiding work that I really should be doing, I made a few basic but necessary improvements to my earthquake RSS feed reading code. I haven’t touched it for ages, but sometimes it’s good to come back to these things after a little while away.
First I tweaked it so that the programme only displays the earthquake data and writes it to the serial port (for arduino) when there is new activity – before it was sending the data every time it checked, which is not helpful. So now we only get new data if there’s a new earthquake.

So you can see from the screen grab that the magnitude of the most recent earthquake was 59 (well, 5.9 really), while the depth was 50 km. In the Processing IDE’s text area at the bottom  it says ” no new activity”, meaning that the data displayed is from the last earthquake.

Next I added a magnitude threshold so it only picks up earthquakes above a certain magnitude. This is mostly because small earthquakes and tremors are surprisingly frequent, sometimes occurring every few seconds. Now the programme only parses a new one roughly every 10 minutes.

“Waiting…” means that the last new earthquake that occurred wasn’t big enough for us to bother with. The idea is more to respond to noteworthy occurences,  on the website the RSS feed is from they distinguish between earthquakes above 2.5, and those of 5.0 and over. However, earthquakes over 5.0 are still surprisingly common, so next I think I’ll look into the classification system a bit more and work out suitable a magnitude threshold.

This works nicely because  the plan is to have the arduino do something physical in response to earthquakes, but I don’t really want that to happen too often, so adjusting the magnitude threshold changes how often  data is sent to the arduino. Well, roughly anyway, but thats a good thing.

The XML feed also contains the date and location of the earthquake so I’ll be doing something with those next, probably nothing too exciting – sometimes it’s just nice to have the meta data.

Next the arduino code also needs doing, not to mention the design and implementation of the hardware and output. At this rate, it’s going to take ages.

Anyway, nothing to exciting, just checkin’ in really.

It’s actually been ages since I was there, and it’s only the second time I’ve been but it is definitely one of my favourite places in the world so I thought it was worth a mention.

I went out there with some friends to go to the Primavera Sound music festival, which is now one of my favourite things in the world.

This is due in no small part to the incredible line-up some of whom, like The Dan Deacon Ensemble and Jesus Lizard, were unforgettable.

On a more boring note it was also incredibly well organized. Hardly any queues for the toilet, and even less queueing at the bar.
The only thing that made it a bit less ‘festivaly’ is that there is no camping – it’s up to you to find somewhere to stay in the city – and it was a much better experience for it. We managed to rent short let apartments for a week, so during the three days of the festival you got to do a bit of exploring, site-seeing or just plane old wandering around during the day before making your way to the festival when it began at 6pm. It felt like more than a festival.

I think if there was camping we would have spent the whole time on the fetsival site and not seen anything else, which is fine if you’re at Reading but a shame if you’re in Barcelona. It’s a beautiful city, even the new bits. Mind you the sun, and the being on holiday probably helps.

Anyway, no point really. Just that I highly recommend the Primavera Sound festival and Barcelona which is now pretty high up on my ‘places I want to live’ list.
More photos and videos here and here respectively.

Its finished! More photos in this flickr set.

Rather pleased with it. Sounds fantastic too, much better than expected.

CTS wiring kit, with short shaft 500k pots, and orange drop tone caps.

Irongear Alchemist 90 pickups. They’re humbucker sized p90′s, but they only come in chrome so I had to spray them gold, not sure how long that will last though!
They just sound amazing, especially with some decent wiring.

Explorer

Took the opportunity to change the machine heads and bridge/stop-tail on my Epiphone (Korina I think, not sure as it was second hand) Explorer too. The old stock gold ones were replaced by chrome Wilkinson locking tuners. No idea why they used the gold ones in the first place, the chrome is much better on an explorer.

Replaced the bridge with a chrome one, but couldn’t remove the original sockets from the guitar, they weren’t gonna budge.

The first step is to replace the machine heads. The old ones were a bit rubbish, probably because they were old. I ordered Wilkinson Deluxe tuners from the good people at Axesrus. I’m sure there are better ones on the market but despite the guitars sentimental value, it’s not really worth spending too much money on it.
Because they are ‘vintage style’ they had to have reducers so that thay would fit the holes in the headstock.

I decided to stick with the black and gold because thats what the guitar was like originally. Hopefully the gold colour will calm down a bit soon.
Again because they’re ‘vintage style’ the new tuning keys also have different fixing holes than the old ones, so I had to drill new ones. I just did it by eye, but I think they lined up pretty well.

Next up is a complete re-wire, including new pickups.

They’re talented guys, check out their Vimeo channel for more.

Knocked this up the other day on the laser cutter, it’s not finished though – when I get a chance I’ll veneer the edges of the MDF.

Very much inspired by spikenzie, although not as slick looking!

Arduino Board (Diecimila).

Arduino Eternet Shield.

16*2 serial LCD . The data sheet is here.

The wiring is largely based on this forum post, but the pin mappings are done according to the data sheet of my lcd display, which addmittedly is not wildly different.

I also edited the c++ file in the lcd4bit library (as shown in the forum post) to set the pins on the arduino – this isn’t difficult, I’ve never done c++ before.

I think this is going to be a weather rss feed display, or possibly something to do with Flickr. Dunno yet, at the moment I’m just messing around with getting xml onto the screen (I’m quite new to  this XML/API stuff). Code still to come, when I manage to get it working.

… I am going to make more stuff. I love making things but don’t do enough of it, or rather I don’t often get to make things, that aren’t the result of a lengthly design process.

These will be mini projects, just for the sake of it and so I imagine that for the most part they will be silly and pointless. So along with my actual design work, this is where I will record their progress, however slow and erratic it may be.

First up – RSS displays. Usefull information, boring format. I wan’t to get my RSS feeds, or at least the ones that I actually take any notice of, away from my computer screen and into the open. Not sure how yet, we’ll see.