Archive for October, 2009
Keyboard touchscreen and Scratch
Adam Somlai-Fischer, creator of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Prezi presentation software, recent Osher fellow, and all around great guy, showed us how to simply and quickly hack a cheap USB keyboard to extract the inner pressure-sensitive “film” and turn it into a low-fi touchscreen by taping it to the computer screen. He showed us some simple programs that use the hack written in Processing, but they turned out to be too dense for my programming-impaired brain to satisfactorily modify.
However, having been playing with Scratch lately, I immediately thought it would make a great interface for it, and that it would be super simple to program for it too. A couple of hours later I had put together a simple but satisfying little game I call Going Bananas!
If you want to play with it with the keyboard, just press keys a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, and l to launch bananas towards the monkey. Don’t let the monkey get too hungry, or it will die! Or course, it’s much more fun when you can poke at the bananas directly on the screen, so find an old (but not too old!) keyboard, break it open, tape it to the screen, and play it as it was meant to be played!
Laser cut felt cuteness
Kristina Larsen on her recent laser cutting adventures:
Most of the time I’ve spent with the laser cutter has centered around learning what different materials will do when cut or etched, and thinking about how to use Illustrator as a pattern-cutting tool. I’m not sure that I made anything before this that I couldn’t have made some other way in a similar amount of time. But in making this felt box I finally took advantage of one of the best features of the tool — generating multiples!
I made a little pile of them in like 10 minutes. So exciting!
They’re cute and fuzzy, utilitarian, and fun to fold. I think they look happy when they’re full of stuff.
At first I tried to make a test version out of paper, but it didn’t work very well. (Paper’s not as pliable and forgiving as felt.) I also had been trying to do all the design thinking in Illustrator ahead of time at home, so I could simply go into the learning studio, cut out the thing and be done. But it didn’t really work out this way — some tweaking was required.
Turns out it’s much much easier to cut one out of felt, mess with it (cut it up, draw on it, squish it), adjust the Illustrator file, cut out a new one, and repeat as necessary. Hey, I guess that’s rapid prototyping in a nutshell.
Possible next steps are to try scaling them differently (shorter sides, more rectangular shapes, steeper angle to the top) and incorporating a second contrasting color showing through cut-outs. Since I only can visit the learning studio once in a while I still am doing a lot of thinking about the design away from the laser cutter. But I’ve also got four of them to futz with while I re-work the design.