This weekend, I finished up a prototype sensor for the NetChimes Projects‘s London site. It’s a bit rudimentary, but it’s a first step. The sensor responds to wind currents outside our London flat, using an Arduino to detect when the clapper strikes the sensing ring. These events are rerouted as serial information to a PureData sketch and forwarded to a Shoutcast server. You can listen to the stream by going to the NetChimes Shoutcast server for London and selecting the Listen link in the middle of the page (or click here). You will receive a “playlist” file which can be opened in iTunes, VLC or Internet Explorer (with the right plug in), allowing you to listen to the sample stream from the London site. Note, that if the wind is not blowing, you won’t hear anything, but there is a station ID announcement every 30 minutes, at the top and middle of the hour.
This sensor prototype will be the basis for the full version of the NetChimes london location, using the impressive King David Chimes (from Woodstock Chimes). For now, you can listen in to the live stream or go to the NetChime Project site and listen to the other streams from Tromso North, Tromso South, or Bournemouth. We’ll be bringing on other streams from Oslo at Art.on.Wires, next week.
Our Taking on the Teenagers project at the London Knowledge Lab aims to increase teenagers’ awareness about energy use. The £1.5M research project was featured on Radio4′s Costing the Earth programme this past week. This is key work in the important problem of starting with young people to raise social awareness of the problems of energy consumption and limited resources and it is good to have a bit of media exposure about it.
This is part of a larger programme about teenagers and energy. Details about the Taking on the Teenagers project start at about 06:45. Listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer
A video of the latest work I’ve been doing on NetChimes.
I’ve been collecting a good deal of data about the Barclays cycle hire bikes using a great little API, which has taken a lot of the pain out of screen scraping the Boris Bikes website. I’ve got several Mb of data now and have got to where I can start to do plots over time. Mapping coloured circles to the number of bikes available has given me a nice little visualisation of the distribution of bikes over the course of the day. I’ll be talking about the project at sameAs on 28 March. And of course, I’ll be continuing work on the ambient display.
You can watch the video:
SameAs – Visualisation – Brock Craft from Steve Allen on Vimeo.
And since I was in the way most of the time, here’s the presentation on slideshare.
It turns out that some of the people over at CASA-UCL, my alma mater, have also been working on this problem (there’s nothing new under the sun!), using historical data obtained from the cycle hire scheme – as recently demoed at Dokbot London.
I’m currently working on the NetChimes project with a group of friends and collaborators in the US and Europe. The result will be an interactive instrument that communicates OSC data live across 4 countries, and which takes local wind currents as inputs into the performance. For the London location (to be sited at Goldsmiths), I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a donation of King David chimes (1.7 metres tall!) from Woodstock Chimes in the US (probably the highest quality manufacturer of precisely tuned consumer chimes). The next step will be designing and mounting the actuator mechanism. Specs forthcoming. Many thanks to Woodstock Chimes for their support!
I’ve been working on getting serial data to an Arduino behind the scenes and on the fly to drive the ambient display for the Boris Bikes. Naturally, a simple script seemed suitable, but sending serial data from a bash script is not a trivial task, so a little helper tool in C, python, or ruby were looming high on my list. However, as with such things, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Fortunately, Ben (over here), has written a nice little python script to handle just such events, which aslo has a nice step-by-step guide for those who are unfamiliar. So, I’m now snagging cycle data from a open-source API and sending the proper string via a similarly open script. Trending the data is also in the pipe.
Updating the data on a regular basis is also going to be key. The final version will operate stand-alone, as an appliance (e.g., ethernet Arduino), but for the prototype, I’m using a computer and sending the data via plain old Serial over USB. As I’m using a Mac, the scheduling bit will be handled via a Launch Agent, which has replaced the deprecated launchd. There’s a handy little guide to using Launch Agents here. It uses scheduled backups as an example, but it works for any regularly launched event (such as a shell script). A nice primer for one of those rarer requirements. I use launch agents and plists to firing off my scripts for backing up as well as syncing data and now, piping stuff over serial.
Really enjoyed this beautiful, sonified representation of the NYC transport system.
Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.
In trying to push the limits of how precisely you can actually position a small induction motor, I ran into a lot of calibration problems – as expected. This is a definitely a job for a stepper. However, I then stepped back a moment to think about the information task. What do I really want to know from my ambient display? In fact, the crucial information is not exactly how many cycles are available until the number starts to get low – too low for me to race out to the station and get a bike! Say…anything under 10 bikes and I should start thinking about leaving. By changing the scale to display only 13 positions (0-10,11-20,20+), I can get a general idea of the number of bikes when it’s not really critical, and gradually provide more precision when it’s really needed. This allows for the needle to be positioned more crudely and still provide a useful display. The needle now indicates a number accurately, even after over 1000 test cycles.
It’s a nice reminder that it is important to ask “What is the communication objective?” when designing information displays (whether ambient, on screen, or on paper), and design accordingly.
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This weekend, I finished up a prototype sensor for the NetChimes Projects‘s London site. It’s a bit rudimentary, but it’s a first step. The sensor responds to wind currents outside our London flat, using an Arduino to detect when the clapper strikes the sensing ring. These events are rerouted as serial information to a PureData sketch and forwarded to a Shoutcast server. You can listen to the stream by going to the NetChimes Shoutcast server for London and selecting the Listen link in the middle of the page (or click here). You will receive a “playlist” file which can be opened in iTunes, VLC or Internet Explorer (with the right plug in), allowing you to listen to the sample stream from the London site. Note, that if the wind is not blowing, you won’t hear anything, but there is a station ID announcement every 30 minutes, at the top and middle of the hour.
Themocracy