I spent the weekend at the Yahoo Hackday last week. As Crave puts it

"The idea behind it was simple: you've got exactly 24 hours to hack together the most interesting, innovative, useful or fun piece of software or hardware, using developer tools from Yahoo, or anyone else for that matter. "

David Filo opened the event, I learnt alot about the Yahoo API's available - a great way for them to show me what i could be using... and thought the talk by Rasmus Lerdorf on hacking with PHP was great.

Next steps - how to organise a hackday at Arup for the virtual design, BIM, GIS and intranet communities...

A second interactive lighting workshop is being held at Arup, organised by Tinker with presentations from Arup, UVA and Philips Lighting.

The workshop will cover an intro to DMX control using Arduino, examples and stories from light installations by Arup, UVA and Tinker, insight into emerging technologies and products from Philips and access to DMX controllable installations (Forcefield, and Optimise) so that you can test your learning on real installations.

If you are interested in hacking DMX controlled lights with Arduino or just want to learn about how interactive light installations work then why not join us... the project page is on the Tinker site

On Christmas Eve Forcefield Interactive went live with the addition of two sensor inputs to allow visitors to the exhibition to play with the light installation.

A kiosk inside the space as well as facing the outside of the window on Fitzroy Street allowed visitors to put their Oyster card on a reader and have their card trigger a unique color to travel throughout the light sculpture. Additionally, a color sensor inside the space allows visitors to place an object of color on a reader, select the color and send it traveling through the installation. The default light display is generated using Perlin noise with the 192 lights being controlled by a single Arduino.

Other collaborators included Tinker.it and Artificial Tourism

We have been working with Tinker.it here in London in organising a few workshops around Arduino. The first is on Interactive Lighting and will involve a mix of presentations on current state of the art and building some simple protoypes. Guest talks include our own Francesco Anselmo, Massimo Banzi from Tinker.it and Daniel Hirschmann from Jason Bruges Studio. The giveaway swag to all attendees include a DMX controller and a DMX shield for Arduino.

For more info and to book a space jump to the workshop web page. This workshop is at Arup in London on Sat/Sun 10/11th May.

I'm wishing that I could attend all of this workshop but the best i can do is a bit at the start and the end.... H3: RFID is the second of a series of hardware hacking workshops in London organised by tinker.it. Massimo Banzi (Arduino founder www.arduino.cc) facilitates the event with Matt Biddulph (www.dopplr.com) The event will be held at the Arup offices and is ideal for anyone wanting to explore RFID and Arduino. The entry fee even includes an RFID kit to take away to show off your prototype. For more info visit the event page. Hopefully the first of many.

Finally got the Arduino BT PIR working and installed in Central Saint Martins and pushing data to the data server. Some photos are on Flickr and more will follow. The Arduino code used is here and a processing app to view the data being sent over the BT serial here. I ended up using a Perl script on the live installation. I will post that once I extract it from the installation.

Would be nice to use this processing library to represent temperature in an environment - *how fast the fire is burning*.

Have had a frustrating day with this accelerometer - cannot figure out the code calculating the actual acceleration in Arduino - see forum posting.

A great example of how people are using Arduino as an input conduit to design product.... uses a home made pressure sensor (conductive wire grids separated by foam) around a punch bag as the input device, the ouptut is a 3D model of the object to be made. Great video, love the soundtrack.

Just back from 2 days with Artificialtourism getting some hands on experience with Arduino. After a morning of intros to Arduino, basic does and don'ts and looking at sensors available we got onto building some prototypes. First up was using a tri colour LED (see Farnell) with a simple cross fade app (from examples in Arduino).



This was then extended to add a serial read from a processing app that defined the RGB value to be used for the LED. The processing app uses an image of a colour wheel and the mousePressed event to get the pixel RGB value and then writes that to the appropriate serial port. Arduino is watching the same port and when it receives data it buffers the RGB values reading them separately into a function that sets the RGB level of the LED using PWM input to the Arduino circuit.



The other *nice* sensor we used was the parallax ultra-sounder...

Arduino - LearnArduino - tutorial on setting up arduino board and ide. Am getting ready for arduino tutorial with Artificialtourism next week. Received boards today from Italy - excellent turn around, just ordered them last week and they were with me this morning - nothing like tearing open a ups package to find a nice little circuit board. Took the usb printer cable out the printer (which is wireless anyway...), downloaded the ide, extracted the usb / serial drivers, plugged it all together and hey presto - the little green led lights up and says *hello world* (well, it wakes up, the next step is to get it saying hello world). Lets get some LED's flashing....

Daniel Shiffman � The Nature of Code - coursework on intro to processing - nice examples.

Arduino Xbee, Zigbee wireless sensor and actuator iterface forwarded by Gonzalo and a potential avenue to explore for bop prototypes. BUT, would need to think about all the apps needed to get the real benefit of the *wirelessness*. The radio removes the need to wire together two communicating arduinos but thats it. To get a network setup and running would need to source methods for multihop networking etc.