Working in the 3d lab

We have been taking apart keyboards with the short term goal to make a clothing related input for max msp. still thinking about what to do so far so here's some pictures.
pic of me by Judit
I still can smell a faint hint of solder.
I took the longest to build mine but I made the most complex base part with 12 wires creating a 29+ possible input options.(I say 29+ since I was trying to only get certain keys but it also picks up extras since the keyboard has two planes of threading the top horizontal and the second vertical and key presses consist of two terminals, which explains why on some keyboards you cant press two keys at exactly the same time.)
tutors have my notebook so been taking more pictures than usual? maybe just in a photo mood

Its quite amusing, just when I start to think that the course is starting to become a entity consumed with the focus on the software. we go out and make stuff and has lead to a random semi tangent that may or mayn't enter fruition .
maybe its just how days are starting to merge into each other days feel short but weeks feel long.

today I learnt that nerd could be a term of endearment well i think it was?

animeta + max msp

some early animated trees

the process for selection is fairly easy you plote node then link 3 nodes to outline the shape whilst forming triangular segments to make distortions easer for the program

then you add joints and bones these are the physics and allow you to move parts like a

Added a full skelletal me ready to have some movement

this program is quite interesting but has a few flaws that I wish was fixed control of layers, video output, undo button
.
for the wednesday session we looked at max msp and how it could be used as a intermediate beween inputs and programs.
For a large proporton of the afternoon Judit and I joined forces to work out the logic for basic mathematics and allowing fine control of the movement instead of jumping between points. after much high fiving and condolence pats later we acheived our aim, and then was shown by James how to do it more consicely, I enjoy having a tinker around and finding my own extravangant methods to solve problems since aspects will likely be aplicable to later problems, and you dont just rote learn a set of comands you develop how to tackle problems.

video of my animation + a max msp element (the trees are brought in by the remote)
bad frame rate due to non native video output.

the wheels fell off (literaly)

oh dear... upon analisis of the video at 17 seconds of the video (about 10 seconds into the routine) there was a collison between maria and tony which caused the butterfly effect for the rest of the show, if we started again we would of have had a succesfull show and would have been in contesion this was possibly due to this where they are suposed to be in a mirrored action which it did do correctly every other test when we were troubleshooting act 1 which due to the jerky nature of the action apears to be a error within the code where it


did this ---------------------------->>
NOOOOOO that's not right silleh Mindstorms program!!!!

This would have been countered if he started slightly further to the stage right. since we hadn't got the right turn calibration right so they would have been fixed by the planned correction just before act 2 to counter a inaccuaracy in the truning we ran out of time to correct.
The whole presentation felt dislodged from me, I was sitting in the audience monitoring the camera watching this bizzaro world version of our week long pride and joy. on a journey to self destruction.Its not so much of a disappointment that it all went chaotic it was almost exciting unexpected and not the same routine that we had repetitively repeated with repeatedly repeated repetition. pity it wasn't as articulate and precise as the one we originally concocted.

We are going to get to film it on Tuesday or Wednesday which should be fun. more so than the actual show.

onto a crit of the other groups in chronological order

Swan lake: the most stand out feature of the swan lake dance was the swan character (aren't swans meant to be white though not brown?) It would spin smoothly and raise its wings they. had a fairly consistent show although they had a fairly strong willed set of lemming NxT but get extra points for being the other group who created a stage.

Black grace: set off with video sequence that quickly suffered from PowerPoint syndrome. and then they had a short dance sequence which was technically good but didn't really seem to represent a week of work. they used chalk on the floor to make trails hopefully this wasn't meant to be symbolic since on the first attempt it left a large phallic shape on the floor.

Stomp: this is the most difficult dance to critique. the choice to have robotic pails was sheer cute and brilliant, but the retro futuristic set felt like a tacky abomination to stomp. a robotic junkyard that looks like some kid from the 80's paper-mache representation of futuristic tecnology? the actual sound didn't seem calculated it was just a series rattles, for such a great source material the end product seemed incomplete.


Overall I enjoyed the breif, it had a large amount of designing things problem solving and teamwork. from a seemingly dificult task with a plethra of options we created order.
we created choreographed motion.We pushed for the most ambitious and precise dance routine with three individual "dancers" and we succeded only to be thrown by two arrows.

A preemptive retrospective

Coming into this project I had no major aim on what I wanted out of it, I had a short list of people whom I wanted to work with, and a equally short list of those who I didn't. the class is like a bell curve with the majority lumped into the middle and the interesting (for positive or detriment) people are on the two poles. upon being told to select a group I had my brain cognitivlystalled but I quickly paired up with Judit who stood out early within the year one group as someone with asthetic ability, visuly driven, good team work, and someone who had produced interesting work in the introduction tasks well except maybe that jester personality bot... and of course having a fully funished blog.

Our skills base is fairly compementary
I'm brilliant at solving a problem complexly and then completely losing plot of what I was doing. wheras she is able to solve the same problem differently and still manage to keep track of the project.

this project was a bit obese since it was a colaboration between 3 groups but in the end it worked out cohesive group J contained Judit, Louise, Rachelle and Ryan. we became code monkeys programming the 3 robots through their 4 acts and we became sort of a mummy bird to the other groups.

At one point we sent the set design group to go find lights a seemingly wild goose chase but they managed to procure the access code to the side storage room that had the video lighting and stands. our most significant production value find. I asked them to find cardboard and a large quanty comes in the next day. A group who when you gave them a task they were able to furfil the requirements. the dificulty was thinking up tasks to be done whilst also focusing on programing the choreography. heading into tomorow im feeling pretty confident.

How do you visualise a scene? and more importantly express the scene to another being, Whilst discussing choereography with Judit its quite tricky to explain what you mean by an action or to visualise what she means. enter the ultimate visualisation tool not a 3d render not a intricate diagram. but to use a NXT as a doll and just turn the servos to get the movement you want and understand the required programed movements to place into the code.

our project is starting to come in to fruition after so much disscussion and thoretical ideas, well I think it is? we are hopefully going to have our basic structure for our set tomorow so we will have a set for part of the group to work on whilst the code choreography monkeys hum the music and mimic dance till the NXT's understand the movements and get timing synced.

at the moment it seems a bit crude appearance wise but it will quickly escalate once we have the set and start on costumes. our goal is to not replicate the disorientation achived by some of the goups in situational shuffle. with our NXT's. looks like its going to plenty of late nights (well it is 11:29pm at the moment)

westside story.

For our latest presentation we have to do a live preformace of westside story, with lego NXT's. I've never had the urge to be in a play before but I have attended a few and did got to look behind the scenes at one of my old highschools plays for the creation of promotional materials, I've always thought it would be awesome actualy seting up one skewed to my vision.

One of the biggest issues so far is the scale of the task, not so much the actual task but of the size of the group, how do you organise 9 different people to be the most effective. splitting people into smaller groups works well, but you cant control multiple groups at the same time

The most random question so far has definately to be "which ones going to be the girl?" seriously? which inanimate object which will all look the same will play the female role?

Judit raised an interesting point about leadership that its not always the most competent its usualy the most noisy who asumes leadership. although my counter argument is why raise a argument if the direction we seem to be going is the same. Is she the leader? prossibly she is the main noise maker. I make noise too though! like i've overheard othergroups disscussions and theres always someone who is the moderator of the disscussion (not even nessarily someone I'd pick to be a leader in one case) otherwise nothing gets done. whats the point of adding something if its going to be the same just with different syntax. if I dissagree with something I'll point it out, although the reason why we picked eachother to be in the same group is you can tell when working with someone is going to be succesfull. if i initated a mutiny it wouldn't acheive much"hey guys now i have the leader title we are going to do exactly the same thing as before. can you even mutiny on a collaborative project? group J feels in charge of the other 2 groups, did I seriously just go thourough a mental debate over is there a leader for that many paragraphs when i could have summed it up so easily as its a colaborative work.

The base design of our NXT's hasn't changed much although I have came up with a less wide version with my home NXT (on right), which will probably become our new base when I have access to BCT7's box of parts. Since it has extra clearance for the distance sensor to hang off the bottom.

Ive worked out its easier to name each NXT so theres no confusion between them. since thats one thing that was fustrating about the chess bot task where every NXT was called NXT on the bluetooth conectons so you had to guess which was yours.

we are now heading into the main stretch of this project with a large proprtion of the group making and decorating the set and working out lighting and another group working on the actual preformers it would be nice if it was finished by thursday morning so we have a whole day of final practice too troubleshoot anything that may/will arise most likely colour thresholds for placement markings.

robopersonality

This task involved portraying our robots personality, how do you represent a series of islands that lay isolated at the bottom of the world and only moves about a centimeter a year. other than the usual cliche of representing new zealand as the maori culture which is a minority. we decided to show a more unified front of NZ expressing the playful nature. a child playing with a buzzy bee. we decided to have a lead machine with a tailing buzzy bee the lead machine was powered using servos to define the movement, whereas the buzzy bee was built to transfer its movement to the wings via cogs

Thomas and Seamus worked on the child and Zak and I had to develop a buzzy bee from a set of linear pieces of Lego which was nice change after working on designing a complex feature based unit using code to have it interact on the previous day, to creating a unit that had a nice form and the gears were in control of the motion, with a nice air of simplicity (except for the gears system only working linear).

other groups presentations included a mr T who was pussyfooted around people (they had difficulty discarding the protocol), a group who mistook a jester for someone who wears KanyeW glasses and dances the box-step. a archer which fired a arrow which was actual quite cool. a group who completely got blitzed by the concept of giving a dice a personality. the group that won had a frog which "jumped" with its front legs and had wheels at the back to make it turn, it elegantly crawled along the floor towards the fly like a child swiming on the ground whilst having a epileptic fit.

and so this concludes the long streak of working with zak seamus and thomas. its been fun,

chess bot the decisive moment.

Today our group learnt an interesting lesson. The extra difficulty of making the robot autonomous and capable at making its own way across a course, we had set it up to be astute at dealing with our impractical original protocol, when it came to the final test our method of navigation became instantly flawed. our primary mode of navigation relied on the ultrasonic sensor to sense when it was going to collide within the next movement (which we set a 100cm aka 1 metre). which works very well when you have a empty hallway not so much when you have a circle of 40 people surrounding the robot our poor little Trolley was going around in a clockwise motion which was different than his usual anticlockwise general motion.
we didn't manage to get far but traveled a decent amount of distance.

In general the least complicated units managed to get the end. and in the final three only one had a sensor which was the touch sensor.

Zak wrote his own version of the commands which came out the same but ALOT tidier. I replaced his turn in the 3rd part of the protocol with the revised turning on the spot command, and it was free to run.

overall what did we learn
. often the conditions you prepare in will be different than in presentation
. simple almost always works
. there is no medals for second to last place (there is no medals at all)
. If we stuck a bayonet on the end no-one would stand in the way but we might have had a difficult job removing it from the wall (maybe this on we didn't learn, yet....)

zak, seamus, thomas and I have almost become experts at overcomplicating through impracticality and then creating and then improving solutions. which is indefinatly better than taking the easy way.

chess bot

This task is a semi lead on from our previous task we had to apply our chess piece protocol to a Lego NXT kit, when I first heard this I was excited, yay we get to program our brick to travel across a giant chess board with our protocol I thought out in my head. but then the horror hit we had to set it up to navigate to the year two studio. a path which involves a right corner then a left corner with a wall at a 45° angle. previously on BCT my group decided that we would create a piece that moved forward 2 then diagonal 1 to its left

The group originally went in a direction of creating a unique model instead of the default working base of the tribot, our first design was a stretch frame with two leading wheels the brick slung in the middle with a supporting wheel. the fault of due the fragility of the frame the chassis would tort making the support wheel unbalanced making the robot curve left on the straights.
after trying a varied array of improved rudder wheels and sleds we then decreased the wheel base, trying to shift the weight balance onto the lead wheels instead of the rear support wheel. resulting in a design dubbed the trolley. which then had claws added to make it less docile.

We started off with a sonar sensor, but fairly late in testing we discovered why it seemed to miss the evasive statements in the program loop at around angles greater than approximately 45° to the left the value for distance would show a reading of 0 when the angle was to 275 ° the wall it would jump from 215° and 0°. due to this when the robot hits the wall at angle it would just dry hump the wall or try and climb it. due to only having one touch sensor we decided to mount it on the left had side since the whole obsession with turning left.

Another one of the issues we struck was trying to tune the angle at which the unit turned which was more of a trial and error test although getting it to turn on the spot was elusive to this time, although I do have a code sequence to potentially alleviate this.

We were the first group to head out into the hallway, by coming up with a flawed robot it allowed us to improve, this assignment wasn't so much a means to succeeding the easiest way possible. (i.e. coding in the instructions, you know which groups your are) but to learn the ropes and practice solving issues that arise from making the NXT autonomous, much like coding its a series of solutions to solve a problem which then create their own problems in a repetitive cycle till you can pass said problems of as a feature.

inspiration

I thought I'd do something slightly different than everyone else and have a blog entry on things that have recently inspired/interested me,

I had seen all of this guys videos early last year this is his newest the 4th and higher production values, collaboration with a rescue helicopter and narative have snucked into his awesome visual effect of a timelapse video using a tiltshift lens (tilted to change the perspective to make the scene look like miniatures http://vimeo.com/3156959

over the weekend I had a why do I take pictures/ what do I want to achieve in photography moment. this is a deep video about reinvention, repitision and a good outer analysis putting ningling issues that seem to escalate in importance into perspective http://www.zarias.com/?p=284

lastly light pink floating smiley faces [HERE]

chess

The task involved inventing a new chess piece and the primary was following its movement protocol through the chess board of the city blocks.

(pictures to follow later treat this as a draft)

This task was the anti-situational shuffle

We created the protocol

We created were in control of the movements

The individuals within the group were able to assume all roles of decision making or to the polar extreme of making no decisions

this proved amusing when we recived the second part of the brief telling us to go from britomart to aotea centere using the movements of our peice. (the jumping groups should have had to give piggybacks for their jump squares)
The group worked out that we'd have to head off 90° from britomart to be able to counter the two left shifts within our upwards movment

My groups piece was the new zealand piece (wanted man with gimp leg but it didn't get traction and wasn't worth focusing on) its unique movement was that it traveled two up then one diagonally from its heading to its left

For the presentation I tasked myself with creating the actual piece
I looked at the most comon set of peices with the curves and baubles
and set out a sketch based upon the current styling of chess peices, to create some degree of continuity on the board if our piece existed

during the documentation i decided to use lines to represent movement since thats how i approach the chess board mentally. a series of pieces that can move a certain line

Zaks animation presentation required a projector and it was interesting since he wanted to move the presentation to the front of the room, partially due to sheer resistance to the idea of moving stuff across the room, and mostly due to the understanding of using space for presentation I suggested we could use both locations, It created almost a similar action with the students walking up and a bit left in the gap between the two set pieces. (I didn't plan it to have a deeper meaning like that I'm not that awesome/waffly)

The majority of groups are still sticking to very flat presentations. and some struggle with conveying a concise narrative, relying on clusters of images to attempt to tell a story, also a trend occurs where a group overcomplicates the design adding unnecessary design elements to their presentation such as adding a series of arrows to the display when hey already had a semi golden spiral and could have come away with a more cohesive presentation.

scouting group dynamics I've started to notice different tiers of ability, who works well in a team, who are the more dominant students, still to early to analyze who has what abilities as there still is some caution/apprehension? this will most likely mimic CADI where a small group of individuals set "protocols" for how things are done. push the current bounds and the rest will follow, forming somewhat of a arms race, we'll see as soon as we get the first brief.

Situational Shuffle

In Situational shuffle...
We went on a journey through the wonderous depths of the CBD only the cards knew which way to go,

The premise of the task was that we were given a set of shuffled cards with randomly mixed instructions on each. these instructions were read out by the informer and the subject followed the instructions once this was done the accutator recorded the action on the map.
my role was the sensor which mean't I was to observe the group and document its progress without external impact.

Highlights of our journey included a egocentric tuk tuk driver informing me not to take photos otherwise he would charge me $5 or confiscate zak's ice-cream and seamus's coffee, following ladys' in red and walking doing a couple of laps down at the waterfront.
the task showed us the difference between how a computer processes a series of instructions vs how humans in a group follow the same instructions. by being given roles it allowed some degree of unquestionable faith in the guidance of the cards. at one point we saw the difference when the group decided to interpret the command and went on a substantial detour, which concluded where we should have been going anyway




one of the problems we encountered was what to do if the card informs you to go straight when there is a fork in the road which minipulated our outcome to some degree.

The presentation aspect was quite a forign experience to me since I'm somewhat used to being self reliant and being in control over all the descisions.
I was somewhat dubious at first about adding in music but the selections accurately reflected the jubliant mood that was present in the group.
we were able to get a cohesive amount of teamwork by having 3 members on content creation and just one person on editing, which seems to break the usual lobsided workload of the editor, by the content creators selecting which bits the editor had access to.


presentation video courtosey of Zak