development
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!
LED light sources in motion
The video shows a set of materials for light experimentation: A simple screen made with an embroidery hoop and a self-made moving LED light source. I wanted to create a set-up that can work on a table or be mounted on a wall, something that can be changed to produce different light patterns. In this instance, the light is moving through a translucent tube, photos below show the same light source inside a mirrored prism and other tunnels.
I got interested in the beautiful effect of a point light source moving through a mirrored tunnel when I worked on kaleidoscopes with artist John Edmark. In the last couple of months, I made this equipment for my own experiments and I would like to try it with our visitors on the museum floor. I think at first I was excited about using this with a Mylar tube (left) , but recently I like to use mirrors and translucent materials.
Once I had started with the embroidery ring as a screen I decided to make everything out of wood. The linkage I used to move the light back and forth worked pretty much right away. It was harder than I thought to find a good light source and that led to inventing one specially for our needs.
We use a LED star with a simple circuit board. It is much brighter than a Mac light, stays at the same brightness for a couple of hours on battery power and can also be plugged in using a 4.5V power supply. On top of being bright, the LED star stays cold and is small enough to fit nicely into the light tunnels I use.
While playing with my new equipment, I noticed that some of the most stunning effects originate from bringing the light source really close to a reflective or translucent material, the light projection can work like a magnifying glass and show the detailed structure of the material projected on a surface.
Marble elevators
In a parallel line of development, we are playing around with marbles and chain reaction elements. One of the problems that we’re constantly facing is how to work against gravity. It’s easy enough for a marble to roll down an incline, but how do you bring it back up? Here are two solutions Walter came up with.
Scratch development: telephortunes
So, in typical Learning Studio style, we hauled a wide variety of materials (switches, motors, art supplies, found objects, etc.) onto a central table, and started playing around.
So I wrote a simple program to count the number of clicks for each number dialed.
