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Our daily lives move in cadence with time. In the morning we are likely to be commuting to work or school. In the afternoon we might be at the mall or at the office. After the sun sets, we could be having dinner with family or at the party with friends across town.
The idea was to create a clock that visually reflects the culture and people of a specific city, in this case Los Angeles. Photo thumbnails are downloaded from Flickr every 30 minutes or so. They’re filtered so that only the latest ones having something to do with LA are downloaded. On a recent Halloween night, the photos were of costumed partygoers, vampires, and zombies. The current time is then created as a mosaic of these photos. The time of day determines the color of the background, reflecting sunrise, high noon, and the dark of night. You can select any thumbnail on the touch screen to view the original photo along with any captions. It feels voyeuristic in a way.
The clock not only tells time, but creates a snapshot of a living, breathing city and its inhabitants. Though a clock repeats itself every 24 hours, a day does not.
I was catching up with a good friend the other day and mentioned that I was working on a ballet. “That’s cool. What’s ballet?” she asked.
My friend grew up like I did, with little to no exposure to the arts. Whereas I’ve stumbled my way into the arts, she’s walked a path where “art” is something that other people do, sort of like other people fly in private chartered planes.
I was astounded. That lack of awareness reinforced my belief that art needs to be made more accessible. In Cinderella- A Rock n’ Romance Ballet, my partner and I are planning to have two shows for school kids. It’s a losing monetary proposition because schools can’t afford to pay for tickets and we will subsidize them to the extent that we are able. In a society dominated by electronic media and short attention spans, an active approach must be taken to introduce kids to the performance arts.
Producing Cinderella has been a challenging process with many ups and downs. There are days when I want nothing more than to go on vacation for a couple of months and let the thing finish (or not) on it’s own. I keep at it partially because I truly hope that some kid in the audience will be inspired by the gaiety and beauty of Cinderella to make art a lifelong pursuit.
What’s the difference between the two bags of LEDs in this photo?
The bag on the right contains 24 white LEDs and cost $20. The bag on the left contains 1900 random LEDs (some of which are white) and cost $66. I feel a little ripped off and a little dumb.
As I mentioned previously, working with the acrylic bonding agent is messy. One drop of the agent will mar a piece and there’s no way to fix it. The applicator bottle is a cheap piece of plastic that leaks easily and doesn’t give you a whole lot of confidence. I ruined one piece and had to re-order it.
The other difficultly is making sure all the pieces are square when bonded. Once you bond two pieces together, they are more or less permanently bonded. The process would be a little easier if I had a fence to align pieces and some kind of square to make sure the angles are correct, but I don’t so I eyeballed it all.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the pieces fit together. The laser cutting is accurate and my measurements were mostly correct. There were a few mistakes like screw holes measured too small, but I found workarounds for most of them.
Aside from the acrylic bonding agent, my other friend has been the hot glue gun. It’s been very handy for mounting everything that isn’t acrylic to the acrylic. It dries a little gummy so it can’t be used for something that needs to be rigid, but it worked well for the LCD panel and the LEDs.
Coming along slowly but there is a little progress. Working with the acrylic bonding agent is very messy—ruined my dining table and the circle in a square piece (which took a week to re-fabricate). There would be more progress on this, but most of my free time is being taken up by the ballet. The frame is 1/4” acrylic. All the other pieces are 1/8”. Dimensions are something like 14.25”x14.25”x4.385”.
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Much to my chagrin, the XT2 does not support 5V hard drives such as the PQI S518 SSD. The Super Talent MasterDrive KX works fine once you switch from IRRT mode to AHCI in the BIOS. Otherwise, Vista complains about not being able to boot off the drive and refuses to do an install.
Finished laying out the frame pieces. Sending it out to get quotes for laser cutting. I was originally going to cut this on my CNC router, but some of the holes and cuts are much smaller than my smallest bit (1/8”) and the laser should give a cleaner edge without the chatter that’s likely to happen with the router. The completed frame will be 14.25”x14.25”x4.5” cut from 1/8” and 1/4” thick clear and translucent white acrylic sheets. Crossing my fingers that all the pieces fit together correctly, that I’m not forgetting anything crucial, and that it’ll look cool when it’s assembled.
I finally got a Zotac IONITX-A-U (at a slight premium) this week and started assembling the clock. The Atom N330 and GeForce 9400M is a great combination and runs faster than I expected. The built-in Ath9K wireless card worked out of the box in Ubuntu 9.0.4, which was a pleasant surprise. Setting up the touch screen and odd video mode took a little trial and error with xorg.conf. The CPU runs hot, especially when you overclock. The fan is a little noisy at the default voltage but running it at 5V seems to work well.
Porting the software from Windows to Linux was fairly easy though there are a couple of issues I haven’t been able to resolve:
- Fullscreen mode does not work properly in Linux unless you redraw the screen every frame, which results in something like a 60% speed reduction. Luckily, this is still fast enough.
- Hiding the mouse cursor does not work in fullscreen mode.
- Drag and Drop does not work with the evtouch touch screen driver.
Part of me is frustrated that these things work easily and properly in Windows but not in Linux, after all Linux is suppose to be the great savior. I am tempted to switch to Windows but paying a $100+ licensing fee per unit hurts where it counts.
In any case, the clock basically works. It probably consumes less than 40W though I won’t take a measurement until the case has been built and the LEDs installed.
My first LED. What is it about bright lights that attracts us like moths?
It may come as a surprise for many that I work on the video game Guitar Hero, have been since the third one in 2007. Every couple of months we have a “play day” at the office, where everyone not fixing urgent bugs take the day to play the latest build of the game by themselves or in groups. Today was one of those days and it’s surreal. Imagine 100+ of your co-workers, men and women in their 20’s and 30’s, belting out a duet of Runnin’ Down a Dream or putting on their best impression of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. These are your stereotypical group of video game developers with Bart Simpson toys on their desks and Dr. Pepper on their shirts.
As you walk from room to room, down one corridor or the next, you hear grown men singing, grown men laughing like children, and grown women beating on plastic drums. And the most surreal thing of all? some of them are really good. You find yourself in your darkened office bathing in the glow of three LCD monitors, enjoying the sounds of music coming at you from geeks all around.
