28 March 2008

I've got a new toy: Arduino

I spent most of yesterday in London, visiting the National Gallery, the Tate Modern and just walking on foot a lot. In the evening I attended the London Flash Platform User Group Talks. This month it was all about Arduino.

"What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. "

I've seen a demo by Alias Cummins using Flash to display information recieved from an Oyster Card. It was good enough for me to it working. Now I've got to make some time and read a lot technical documents on how to use it.

Except the official website :
http://tinker.it/
Alias also recomended this site:
http://arduino.cc/

Tink encouraged me to do something with this tool and show it back to the group. I already have an idea in mind. To a certain extent it relates to Tim Long's idea

And here's my new toy:



Pretty geeky isn't it ?
This will upgrade my status from the best programmer in the Fine Arts department :P

tube

I've recently returned from London. Another day spent walking all day and I was lucky enough to catch a great weather. I've promised myself to keep this post short, so here's the thing: I get all sort of random ideas when I'm away from the computer.
Here's an example:



From time to time there will be more of these 'random thoughts' posted.

17 March 2008

Dithering in actionscript 3.0

I had to convert some images from color to monochrome while keeping as much detail as possible therefore I had to dither images.

The closest thing in as3 I found was this experiment on Sephiroth's website. You can read his blog entry here.

These are some pretty nice experiments, but not quite what I needed. So there was some research going on and the result is this:

Some of the algorithms were ported in as3 from pseudo code and explanations found in the following resources: this, this , this, this, this, and this

This port would not be possible without the help of Iulia Nastasoiu - Java developer, singer, dancer and ocasional philosopher and Teodor Stoenescu - programmer, drummer and general wise ass. Check out Pandrea for a heavy dose of 'mioritic metal'





I found the image in one of the sites listed above and I see it as a 'Hello World!' of the dithering algorithms

You can view code here


[EDIT]

Ralph Hauwert, a very important contributor to the Papervision3D project ( thank you for the cool materials and shaders ) has his own Dithering experiments.

There might be some confusion, so I'll try to break it down. I needed a monochrome dithered image resulting from any given image, so my version is thought for only one color. Ralph's version supports colour. For further info on his implementation I advise you to read his blog entry here

You can find his classes on Google Code

[/EDIT]

5 March 2008

Particle Play

I had a bit of time to play with flintparticles.
I attended a lecture on flintparticles last week at the London Flash Platform User Group.
You can view the slides from the presentation here.

So here goes:


Weird Atom
view source



Liner
view source




Worm Hole
view source


4 March 2008

Colin Moock's ActionScript 3.0:From The Ground Up Tour




Hello World!
This is the first post of this blog on ideas, random thoughts and other geeky stuff.

Recently I've attended Colin Moock's ActionScript 3.0 seminar. I've been delaying the moment until I'll migrate to as3 for some time, now it seems smooth. I was expecting to see Colin tired or bored by preaching this lecture again, in London this time. I couldn't tell actually, he was energic and kept us going.


If you're interested in the lecture, all the notes are posted here:

http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/

My version of the project can be found here.
The classes from the lecture are included and the ugly drawings as well.

Here's Stan:



If you are using Firefox and you have Flash Tracer installed you can view the traces of death :)
The Flash Tracer add-on is available here


There are more events coming up. Adobe is pretty determined to promote their new tehcnologies. Next Up: on AIR Tour . See you in London.



I almost forgot: I'm the proud owner this special Essential Actionscript 3.0 signed by Colin Moock himself.



This is added to the existing ones from:

Lee Brimelow




Keith Peters,
Brendan Dawes,
André Michelle,
Erik Natzke,
Carlos Ulloa,
Joey Lott,
Tink,
Seb Lee Delisle
and last but not least Aral Balkan