After a year of requirements gathering, development, refinement, and testing, iBats is finally ready for release! I’ve been working in collaboration with Adam Talcott of Atomic Powered to create a new iPhone application for the Institute of Zoology, in London. The app allows anyone with an iPhone to collaborate with the Institute to collect data on various bat species. The app connects to an ultrasonic microphone and records bat chirps, marrying this audio data with geotagging. Volunteers can drive around and sample bat sounds, so that data about populations and activity can be collected and uploaded to the Institute. People can set up an account to help out with the Indicator Bats Programme which tracks biodiversity.
As part of this project, I had to develop a cable adaptor which would allow users to connect a stereo line-in jack to the iPhone. The iPhone has a sensing circuit, so that it knows when a mic is plugged in – so you can’t simply plug a stereo line directly into an iPhone and get it to work. I previously posted details about hack to deal with this, and a circuit diagram so that you can build your own. Special props to Peter Knight for assistance with this part of the project!
The iBats app will be integrated with online user accounts and will be released on the App Store in the near future. I’ll post a link when it is ready for download there. An Android version is also being written.
In the US, there’s recently been a great furore over a planned Islamic Community Center to be built near Ground Zero in New York. Inflammatory rhetoric from detractors and anti-Muslim fanatics fans the flames. Inspired by a graphic sketch by Mark Schmidt on Facebook, I created an Infographic which shows the approximate relative sizes of the various parties involved. The chart illustrates the absurdity of gross generalisations which lump all Muslims together with Al Qaeda and discount the fact that lost of americans are Muslims, too. (Many Muslims would also argue the red dot should not be included in the circle containing all Muslims.)
Just finished a really pleasant seminar yesterday at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the Univeristy of Nottingham. “TEL” in the title refers to Technology enhanced learning. I’ve been trying to unpick the connections between making and hacking and TEL for a while now and appreciate any comments of suggestions in this area.
There’s streaming video on their site and here are the slides:
Just came across Adobe’s Kuler, an excellent online tool for creating and exploring colour palettes. I’m using it for making some aesthetic choices for some prototype GUIs in Processing…nifty!
Presentation graphics packages like PowerPoint have always been slightly irritating to me. Although they can make it easy to present ideas, this doesn’t mean that the presentation will be meaningful to an audience. Information design heavyweight Edward Tufte has offered scathing critiques of presentation software and argues that they lead to a different kind of thinking for both present and audience.
This funny poster on BoingBoing (thanks Cory) encapsulates this love-hate relationship and pokes fun at Tufte as well. I’m still chuckling…
For an added knee-slapper, check out the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation by Peter Norvig.
Recently, as part of an iPhone development project I’ve been working on with the Institute of Zoology and Birkbeck, I had a need for an audio line in adapter so that we’d be able to record stereo audio from an audio sensor. The application tags audio data with GPS information as part of a citizen-scientist data collection project.
Strangely (or perhaps I didn’t dig around the interweb long enough) I didn’t find many resources for a home-brew line-in adapter and the ones I found were pretty vague and hard to follow. So Peter and I put our heads together and rolled our own. It’s a fairly straightforward circuit, but has a little twist, because the iPhone OS is smart enough to detect what’s plugged into the stereo jack. (The diagram above is a lot more clear than anything I found.) This particular project only required a left channel audio input to the monaural iPhone mic, but if you wanted to route both left and right channels to the mic, that’s represented by the dashed line.
The resistor+capacitor network provides a pull-up that the iPhone is looking for to detect whether you’ve got a standard stereo headset plugged in or whether you’ve got a microphone (i.e., iPhone) headset and can take a phone call with it. This particular circuit is tuned for the audio sensor we’ve been using, but is about the right spec for most audio recording purposes and works fine with the audio recording app that ships with the iPhone. The parts cost about £3 and I whipped one up in about 10 minutes!
I’m still marvelling at what you can do with SmartSockets, a 14 segment display driver for multi-segment display tubes like ZM1350s and in particular, B7971 grand-daddies. Enthusiasts such as John Taylor have created some really nice transition animations to demonstrate what you can do to add visual interest to clocks and other alphanumeric displays, like the four-letter word display. There’s also a SmartSockets group on Yahoo, which is an offshoot of the more popular NeoNixie group of which I’ve been a member (lurker) for years. Traffic on SmartSockets is relatively low…for now.
Well, it’s 2010 and what a harsh decade it has been! To ring in the New Year on a positive note, I harvested an old edge-lit display mechanism from my stores and lit it up with a few LEDs and an Arduino. I used a simple pulse-width modulation (PWM) routine to do the fading. It’s not terribly exciting, but you can watch the video…
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