Penguin catches fish

Knitted glove puppet with hand-made sensors in flippers, controlling its on-screen avatar. 

See http://www.itknit.com for details: early prototype glove puppet used as game controller.

Life Project Exhibition at Space

Debut for "life but not" creatures in Space this evening, showing off their craftwork, flashing lights, squeaks and tweets.
http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/courses/openlab-the-real-game-of-life-project
http://lifeproject.spacestudios.org.uk/

Creatures

Habitat

Playing with exhibits

Creatures tweeting

IT KNIT

http://www.itknit.com

Vibrobot Saturday

Homage to Evil Mad Scientist.  We scuppered old motors from toy cars instead of using mobile pagers.  The manufactured track is from a Hexbug Nano set.

Flawed Code 39 scarf...

More experimental interactive knitting

But look here - someone managed to do it successfully a few years ago - LK lendorff.kaywa.com - with space invaders!

Knitted QR Code

Created for The Life Project

pH ART

A day at Chesterton Primary showing Year 2 kids how to make their own litmus paper using red cabbage.

Chop and boil the cabbage for 10 min, then paint the dark red juice onto blotting paper.  Leave it to dry, or warm very gently in oven.  When it's dry, you can cut it into strips.

Children painting with lemon and bicarb

Use the strips for testing various liquids - try milk, oven cleaner, lemon juice, baking soda, saliva etc.

The children numbered their strips and wrote down what they had tested.  When they went back to class, they did a presentation and explained how some things are acid, some are alkali and some are neutral.

Red cabbage litmus test strips 

At home, we used lemon juice, bicarbonate of soda and tea as finger paints.

Rude Cats

Clips from toy theatre project, using TAGS hidden in the puppets and an RFID reader in the cottage.  The cats make different comments depending on who approaches.  Lots of fun making puppets and voicing cats.

 

Using Processing to play audio files, triggered via Arduino (with RFID reader) connected through serial port.  The cats have a range of responses for each tag, so the output is randomised.  You can hear the same audio clip being invoked more than once so the sounds overlap.

RAT RACE

Tested simple mobile app at the Digital Shoreditch Festival on Saturday 7th May, 2011.  Thanks to Chris Lane for organising the event since I was remote.

Rat Race links sms messages to a Flash client via SQL and PHP.  Players are represented by the constantly-orbiting rats, which they feed by texting the answers to clues.  This makes their rat grow bigger and faster.  The game screen also shows how many times clues have been answered correctly - represented by girth of small cheeses.

This screenshot shows the game in progress on Saturday afternoon.

The Real Game Of Life 2011

http://lifeproject.spacestudios.org.uk/


Interactive, living ecosystem of machine "life"
5/4/11 First meet-up

MAKER FAIRE 12-13 March 2011

Just back from Maker Faire in Newcastle, and it was one of my best ever festival experiences.

Kids loved ZU3D workshop - http://www.zu3d.com - where they made their own playdough models and created stop-frame animations.  Also DIY PIE (although they ran out of pastry for jam tarts), where they cut out and decorated oven gloves.  They made pin-hole cameras from beer cans, designed and created pop-up cards, built amazing marble runs from cardboard and plastic piping and empty bottles (and masses of gaffer tape), also home-made compasses from paper cups and paper clips... We never made it to the guerilla knitting zone.

Some great audio stuff, in particular Mike Cook's hexome...

BIG PIECES: El Grando the fire-breathing dragon was pretty hot, there was a noisy robot fighting arena + Arc Attack show.

Fun pieces: the robot toilet cruising around outside the venue, illuminator imaginator pictures from glowstix, chainmail makers and a giant cardboard spider over a giant cardboard racetrack hosting wiimote controlled cars equipped with their own webcam eyes, a flirtboard interactive table that senses when your beermat is close to mine, the pulsing Emergence tree...

Run marble run

Thanks to Renzo the Toymaker http://www.toymakingactivities.com/english/homepage.html for the original idea of making a marble run from cardboard.  

We built this one from cornflake packet, glue, sellotape.  Designing it was fun, testing it was better.