Not wanting to leave our dance mat txt machine, made for the village fete in july, folded up in a box in the back room I’m developing the project further. Through linking a mobile phone with bluetooth to the PC, the txt messages typed with your feet can now be sent as real sms. This works because the PC understands the mobile as an external modem and so through using AT commands the mobile can be controlled through the PC.

Over the weekend, I’ve been experimenting with the idea of paint-on circuits. Using a vinyl cut plotter, I knocked up a quick proof of concept circuit: stencil:

I have lots of old cds lying around, so I removed the reflective substrate, drilled holes for mounting components, and made the simplest circuit I could think of – a 3 colour led.

Paint-on circuits are good because they let you put together simple circuits quickly and without any nasty chemicals, and as long as you have some AOL cds and conductive paint, you can make a basic circuit board in an hour or so. Awesome.

What needs to happen next is some research into the resistance and capacity of the painted on traces – it’s possible that they’d create large amounts of resistance or burn out quickly, so I need to look into that. Also, you can get reflective plot cutter flex and adhesive vinyl, so I’d like to get some of that and see how conductive it is.

These are beautiful:

LilyPad is a wearable e-textile technology developed by Leah Buechley and cooperatively designed by Leah and SparkFun. Each LilyPad was creatively designed to have large connecting pads to allow them to be sewn into clothing. Various input, output, power, and sensor boards are available. They’re even washable!

I love the circular form factor of these – it’s a really nice approach to circuit design and probably more spatially efficient in terms of the stresses placed on it. Check out Leah Buechley’s earlier prototypes here.
Also, technical data here.
Wearable electronics might soon become not-totally-ridiculous!

So for the gaming table project, Shawn and I were talking about using Plasma Pong as a starting point, since it’s a pretty amazing game, and already made.

Unfortunately, Atari’s team of flying winged monkey IP lawyers has gotten to the plasma pong creator

Luckily, there’s still a mirror here.

Here’s what it looks like if you haven’t seen it before:

Last night Shawn and I went to see a number of presentations at This Happened. The one that most interrested me was Karsten Schmidt‘s work with Moving Brands on the LCF degree show. It uses a free machine vision application called reactivision to display graduate work on huge interactive tabletops. Pretty awesome stuff.

Reactivision is good because the shapes it uses to recognise movement are “bred” using a genetic algorithm, so they are optimal shapes for machine vision tracking. It may be possible to use them as a basis for a purely flash based machine vision library, which could be interesting. In the meantime, it seems fairly feasible to connect it to flash or processing via a socket server, which is fine for most things.

Here’s a couple of videos of reactivision in action: