Intro

Urbana is an annual fundraiser hosted by Dharma Developments where proceeds raised support community programs with the goal of preventing homelessness in Ottawa. This year, URBANA is helping Action Housing / Action-Logement, an Ottawa-based charitable organization that assists low-income individuals and families to find and maintain safe, affordable and adequate rental housing.

Each annual Urbana hosts an artistic feature from local artists.  This year, Dharma contacted Deb and I for an interactive lighting installation by The Latest Artists.  The theme of “an on-going light for housing rights” was developed by integrating our medium of light with the need for the awareness of housing (and other social/charitable) issues to remain front and center: these issues don’t simply get solved with single instances of involvement or donation, but require constant attention to address.

This theme lead to the proposed installation: a large lighting structure, architecturally-inspired, requiring on-going crowd interaction to propagate its behavior, or,” keep the lights on.”

Some Google Sketchups were created:

This first sketch shows the six foot structure with an assortment of illuminated windows, akin to an apartment tower at night, w/ residents inside watching tv.  The planned interaction for this mode was to have the crowd turn on the windows by touching them, after which the window remains lit for a period of time before turning off again; constant interaction is needed to keep the piece illuminated.

The sketch below shows off the full color (RGB) capabilities of the piece. Animations like this could be used in a game play mode to signify winners:

Read on for technical details of the project and to see the finished piece . . .

Design + Fabrication

Fabrication was key to this project, for providing a robust, polished product.  With the help of Flux Lighting, we finalized the structure design and they provided some exciting renderings:

The bare structure

Structure with acrylic windows installed

The illuminated piece

In parallel to the design and fabrication of the structure, the electronics and lighting were designed and assembled.

The greatest technical challenge was making each window individually touch responsive.  Our first impulse was to have an IR transmitter/emitter pair behind each window to sense a hand blocking the window; this was quickly put to rest by trying to fire IR through the acrylic only to have it bounce directly back and flood the sensor, making it only useful for detecting the acrylic windows themselves.  Perhaps a combination of IR and IR-response cameras would do the trick, but we avoided this approach due to complexity and space issues inside the structure.  The thought of wiring up individual piezo elements to each window, or some sort of physical switch, was too labour-intensive seeing as there are a total of 120 windows.

The most promising and scalable solution seemed to be capacitive touch sensing.  We originally thought of using a dedicated chip like this, but after learning about the CapSense library — which works with minimal external parts on an Arduino — we decided to test a mock-up touch surface.

The advantage of the capacitive sensing was that we could use a row/column matrix arrangement, thus only needing 11 sense electrodes for the 30 windows of each fixture side (five for the columns, and six for the rows).  This conveniently used 11 of the Arduino digital pins, while leaving the two serial pins free for communication.  Four dedicated Prototinos were used, one for sensing the windows on each side of the fixture.

In consideration of budget vs. labor, Shiftbrites were used for the lighting.  Each window has a single Shiftbrite mounted behind it, allowing for full color (RGB), individual control of each window’s illumination.

Based on a previous project by Macetech, makers of Shiftbrites, we used lighting louvers as a substrate to mount the lights on.  Here’s a pic of our assembled “light cage:”

With lighting and touch sensing in place, we focused on a control scheme, deciding on an external control scheme, allowing the fixture’s behavior to remain easily reprogrammable.  Our specific arrangement made use of a custom computer-based control panel written in Processing.

Here’s a schematic the control scheme:

The top row shows the four Shiftbrite panels that make up the four walls of the light cage; the 120 Shiftbrites are controlled by a single Prototino, connected to an XBee (and breakout adapter).  The bottom row shows the four acrylic panels, each having a capacitive sensing matrix connected to a corresponding Prototino and XBee/breakout combo (I attempted to utilize serial messaging between the touch sense controllers with a single XBee to take care of all the messaging for the four sides, but I obtained much better results using individual XBees than ironing out my own protocol).  On the right is a laptop, running the control software, and communicating with the touch panels and the light cage: the touch panels only send data to the control software when a touch is registered, and the control software then processes that information and sends appropriate commands to the light cage; calibration and debugging messages can also be sent between the control software and the touch panels and light cage.

Here’s an early pic of the control software and corresponding lights:

When the galvanized steel structure was available from the fabricators, it was time to assemble everything.  This stage took a considerable amount of time since all the elements had exact mounting points that had to be accurately drilled to match the precise machining of the structure.

The below pic shows one of the window touch panels mounted to the inside of its corresponding structure wall:

You can clearly see the row/column touch electrodes; each intersection corresponds with the middle of a window, so when someone touches a window, which particular one can be determined from the corresponding row/columns registering a touch.  This arrangement worked surprisingly well (after debugging some grounding and interference issues caused by the metal structure itself).

Here’s a pic showing three assembled sides of the structure while the power to the light cage is checked and double-checked:

The light cage is attached to a steel plate that mates with the top of the structure, so it literally hangs in the middle of the inside of the structure, each light aligned with a specific window.

The below pic better illustrates how I actually felt getting everything together under the tight deadline for the debut of the piece at Urbana:

In situ

After getting everything assembled and tested, it then all had to be torn down again for transportation to the event.  I think once re-assembled and powered up at the venue, the final result was well worth the effort:

Installation view

detail view

The crowd also seemed to enjoy it and it certainly made for an interesting conversation piece:

We were pretty proud as well:

The Latest Artists (Deborah + Andrew O’Malley)

. . . and Aksash Sinha of Dharma Developments was very happy w/ the literal and illuminating tie-in to the evening’s cause:

Andrew + Deborah O’Malley and Akash Sinha

Afterthoughts

So what did we learn?

Timeline management of supply chain and fabrication is crucial.  Thank goodness for overnight shipping and a highly helpful and skillful fabrication team.

Capacitive sensing is touchy!  A major problem we encountered was tuning the capacitive touch system.  The circuit exhibited varying behavior between all environments from proof-of-concept to final integration with the structure.  We experienced noise problems when using the touch panels near the lights, and further interference when the arrangement was placed into the metal structure (common grounding solved most of these issues — subject to a blog post all their own).  The biggest downfall to this sensitivity was experienced during the move from studio testing to the actual venue: in the studio we had to use sensitive settings to obtain usable touch data, while once in the venue, the control software was receiving so much touch data that it became overwhelmed and couldn’t control the lighting exactly has planned.

Shiftbrites are simple in theory — the control data gets passed along nicely from the controller to each respective light along the chain — but have many practical caveats: power needs to be injected along the chain to keep things stable; the power supply used has implications; a long chain of Shiftbrites seems very susceptible to interference/glitches on the data lines, resulting in unwanted behavior (solved largely in software); and you must be very careful interconnecting Shiftbrites as they are easily damaged irreparably (make sure to order a contingent stash!).  Diffusion needs to be well thought-out as well.

Next plans?

We received a lot encouraging feedback on the fixture from the Urbana crowd and several offers of interest to host it at other events/venues, so we’re currently considering these options along w/ plans to tour the piece around other events/festivals where it can be programmed to compliment their themes.

In the meantime, we’ll be refining the control software and programming/capabilities of the fixture.  We also hope to improve the internal light cage, as it was quite fragile for transportation/installation; along with adding a grid of  blinds inside the structure to better isolate each Shiftbrite’s light output to it’s specific window as we experienced a bit of light overlap between windows.

Stay tuned for updates . . .

Acknowledgments

Writing this summary, I’d like to thank Deb for taking this on with me as one of our more complex projects as The Latest Artists to date.

Together, we’d like to thank the team at Dharma Developments for inviting us to participate in Urbana 2011; we’ve been keen to work on something inspired by the evolving, ambient light patterns of apartment towers at night, and Urbana 2011 provided the perfect impetus to get a project like this started.

Big thanks to Dan and Caleb at Flux Lighting for all their interest in, enthusiasm for, and enabling of this project on the fabrication side.

Garrette at Macetech was extremely helpful with his knowledge of Shiftbrites and seems very comitted to helping customers get their ideas up and running.

Thanks also to the City of Ottawa, their funding and support has also been instrumental in realizing this project.

Further reading

The Ottawa Citizen covered the event here, and if you’re still hungry for more pics, there’s another album here.

New “big font” time display

If you haven’t already, it’s time to update your DOTKLOK!  When you plug your DOTKLOK in, the software version will briefly be displayed (if there is no display, you are running code version 1.0 or older).  The latest release is version 1.3, now available at the DOTKLOK project page in the Source section; you’ll also find the instructions for updating your DOTKLOK in the usage instructions document.

There’s been a lot changes, updates, and improvements made between version 1.0 and 1.3, so I thought I’d summarize them here.  In addition to a handful of behind-the-scenes improvements to the inner workings of the code, the total animation count has almost doubled from the original 8 animations to the current variety of 14!

As shown in the photo at the top of this article, I’ve created a new “big font” time display that replaces the original “basic time” display; this was done both to take more advantage of the total screen space, and to add more variety since the “basic time” and “game time” displays were very similar (aside from the occasional visit from Pacman and friends).

Here’s a rundown of the new animations:

Shown above is a shot of the “game time” animation.  Although not new to most, this animation was actually introduced in version 1.1 of the code, so some of you out there might be missing this fun one.  With each new minute, the old time is randomly cleared, either by a dissolve, getting eaten by Pacman or a Space Invader, or wiped away by falling Tetris blocks.  I think it’s best illustrated with a video:

The above photo shows “Morse time,” which, as I’m sure you can infer, shows the time in Morse code.  The hours, minutes, and seconds scroll across the screen at randomly changing rates, giving the feeling of trains passing in parallel at different speeds.

With all the abstract and digital time representations, I’d been wanting something a bit more “traditional” for a while, so I came up w/ this simple and minimal analog clock face; it’s only accurate to 5 minutes — due to the low resolution of the screen — but this fits in well since most DOTKLOK animations have some sort of twist when it comes to showing the time

Version 1.2 of the code brought “accumulator time:”

Inspired by the analog clock face from version 1.1, but with a digital twist, I wanted an animation that both showed time accumulating over the day, and was easy to read.  Each full block represents an entire hour, and the individual dots of each block represent 5 minutes each; so the time shown above is 9:30.

And what “geeky” clock would be complete without a binary clock?!

But of course, rather than simply showing the hours, minutes, and seconds in an abstract/binary format (we have Morse time for that), this binary display represents the number of seconds passed in the current year (adjusted for leap-years, even).  The motivation behind this one was to have a pattern that takes much longer than 24 hours to repeat.

Which brings us to 1.3: an updated big font (shown at the top of this article), and brightness adjustment!  The usage instructions explain how to chose from the 5 brightness levels now available for the LED screen.

So . . . if your DOTKLOK is running code version 1.2 or earlier, I recommend you get yourself an FTDI cable or an Arduino and make use of that programming header; everything is covered in the usage instructions.

Enjoy!

Other news

In other DOTKLOK news, we’re starting to get some community contributions.

Bryan added a photo-resistor to his DOTKLOK so the brightness adjusts automatically:

You can see his Instructable for all the how-to on that one.

Another hardware mod includes Daniel’s addition of a temperature sensor.  All the mods for DOTKLOK will be chronicled at the DOTKLOK Facebook page.

The abundant Tube Clock Database blog also favorably reviewed DOTKLOK; you can read the whole article here, or check out the accompanying video below:

Time will only tell what comes next

Alongside work by Aili Kurtis, Paul Schibli, Guy Lavigueur, Jennifer Gibbs, Reid MacLachlan, John Roth, and Tony Broderick, I’m debuting work exploring new themes for me: a light piece controlled by the colour of the sky.

The light patterns displayed by Sky Spectrum are directly related to the current sky conditions above Ottawa’s Peace Tower.  Every few minutes, the sky portion of the Hill Cam is analysed to reveal the average red, green, and blue components present in the sky.  The light fixture responds according to the various relationships between these values, presenting an altered view of the sky above, revealing colour details and relationships invisible to the naked eye.

The literal reference to the sky is echoed by the graphic processing portion of the piece which takes place on a remote webserver, in essence utilizing “cloud computing.”

Most of the work indeed takes place on my webserver, where a PHP script analyses the current Hill Cam pic with the GB library.  A small hardware module (hidden in the gallery) consisting of an Arduino development board and ethernet shield fetches the data from the web every few minutes, and sends the data via XBee radio to the light fixture, which is controlled by a custom board with an ATmega328 (running the Arduino bootloader), TLC5940 for driving the LED strips, and an XBee.

The code is only preliminary at this point, and I plan to analyse the daily data collected from the sky to make a growing library of light patterns and blends.  I’m also excited about how scalable the concept is, and look forward to working with this idea on a larger scale.

The Phenomena exhibition runs until Feb. 27, so if you’re in the Ottawa area, please drop by CUBE Gallery (1285 Wellington Ave., W) to check it out.  The best time to view Sky Spectrum is between 4 and 6 pm when the sun is setting and the sky changes relatively quickly

As you may have noticed from the sidebar on the right of this page, DOTKLOK “unofficially” launched before Christmas when I quietly put it up on Etsy, planning to spread the word during the beginning of 2011 . . .

Well, things got started for me when it was picked up over the holidays by a handful of blogs, including OhGizmo, Totally Cool Gadgets, Smidigit (Sweden), Rock N Tech (Brazil), Gizmodiva, GeekAlerts, The Vine (Australia),  HomeDosh, dubbing DOTKLOK “one of the coolest clocks ever made,” Technabob (UK), and a major source of those first orders, the German Engadget site.

The internet did its magic: I received a bunch of European orders which pushed me into production mode.

Now that a dedicated webpage including documentation is done, I feel safe saying that DOTKLOK has officially launched

For the final “1.0″ design, I opted to put the buttons on the sides, which not only makes them easier to use (as opposed to along the bottom edge), but also makes it possible to repurpose or adapt DOTKLOK so two people can play a game of Pong — definitely something coming to a future firmware update.

Here’s a vid showing some patterns operating on the 1.0 hardware release:

DOTKLOK is available either as a kit (fully illustrated instructions included), or fully assembled and programmed, ready to go!  It’s available in red or green versions as well.  At the moment all sales are handled through my Etsy page.

Here’s a few reactions from the first lucky owners:

“Received the clock in time to give to my partner as a b’day present today. It was a great hit and best part is I get to enjoy it as well”

“The clock arrived a couple of days ago. Looks great on my living room wall!  I really like the Dotklok. The parts are high quality, beautifully finished faceplates and assembling the kit was a lot of fun! Thanks for making this really cool clock!”

I’ve set up a Facebook page to upload user pics and as a support forum and place for people to make suggestions for future animations.

Next up, a promo/press sheet and then the first real promo push . . .

[ more info after the break]

After a lot of consideration, I’ve decided that the buttons for the final design will most likely be positioned two on each side, as in the first prototype:

My reasons for this are several.  By having the buttons on the side, DOTKLOK becomes a more open platform, perhaps even for lo-fi gaming; since I have a Pong time animation, buttons on the side would allow two people to easily play Pong on DOTKLOK, which would be akward w/ the buttons along the bottom.  From my experience with both arrangements, side situated buttons are also easier to use to control the clock (select the animations and set the time) than a row along the bottom.  The only advantage I really see with the bottom buttons is aesthetic, which is subjective.  I think for a kit that encourages customization, the slight, subjective, aesthetic trade-off is worth it for a more flexible platform.

Also new are a few more animations, such as Percent Time, which shows the time as percentage of the day passed (calculated such that one minute = 0.07%):

Here’s a few pics of the 3rd beta DOTKLOK, before sourcing the black buttons:

The previous photo shows Seconds Time, with the number of seconds passed since midnight in the top row, with the bottom showing seconds in the day remaining.  The next photo shows a more standard Date/Time animation:

DOTKLOK is currently on display at the Manchester Art Gallery’s Make It Yourself show, which is a supporting exhibit to the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer solo show, Recorders.   It’s also on display in Ottawa at the Prototype show, part of Artengine’s biennial, electronic art + sound festival, Electric Fields.

I’m hoping to have the first 25-50 DOTKLOK kits ready to order before December, stay tuned to this blog or the project web page for the latest info, as I’m also considering opening up pre-orders in a week or so . . .

The final version will probably have a black/smoked case with a choice of red or green LEDs.

Not sure if the buttons will be on the side or the bottom yet — which would you prefer?

A few more pics from the prototyping stage of DOTKLOK (see my introductory blog post here.

I’ve soldered my prototyping circuit together:

Next up: a user interface (buttons!) and writing lots of time animations . . .

DOTKLOK will be an open source clock kit with multiple time-telling animations, some literal like the simple display above, and others showing the passage of time through abstract patterns, following on from my Electric Window 3 series.

The inspiration for this clock is to combine a bunch of cool ways to show time — such as in a sentence, with words, or retro game displays — along with my own original animations, while providing a platform on which others can further develop cool timepieces.

Thanks to a great RTC1307 tutorial and library by Adafruit, I was interfacing with the clock chip faster than expected, and soon had a rudimentary sketch up and running:

The font’s not too hot, but it’s the default one I had from the Electric Window 3 software.  I’ll be developing several special time fonts and and animations over the next few weeks, along with designing a cool laser-cut acrylic case to round out a kit that’ll be great for both those who want to hack and mod the clock, and those who simply want to plug it in and enjoy.

[ Eyebeam bio ]

Working with Hernani Dias on the Re:Farm project (see my previous post for some more info about the Re:Farm project), my first objective is to create the PCB for the Re:Farm On The Wall module, a data visualization module using an LED display to present data away from the computer screen.

[ details after the break ]

Here’s Hernani’s original sketch for displaying the soil moisture level from 6 sensors:

This design uses 7 LEDs to display the soil moisture level for each of 6 sensors (42 in all). The design concept has been formalized as seen below:

The module still has 7 LEDs for each sensor (or farm/garden), but with the addition of LEDs between the groups (for a total of 48) to create a complete circle which can be used with other templates, such as the one below, for visualizing other data such as temperature or humidity:

Ideally, the board will also incorporate a stepper motor to drive a needle (like a speedometer) for an additional data channel.

I’m going to first concentrate on the LED display. Since the board will make use of an ATMEGA microcontroller (Arduino) chip and an XBee radio (to receive the data), real estate on the approx. 3″ x 3″ board is already a bit tight, so I am currently researching Charlieplexing, an LED driving scheme which allows N*(N-1) LEDs to be directly driven by N pins of the microcontroller. 8 data pins from the microcontroller can thus be used to control the 48 LEDs since Charlieplexing with 8 pins allows control of up to 8*7=56 LEDs.

At The Next HOPE conference this past weekend (blog post about the conference forthcoming), Jimmie P. Rogers was demo’ing and selling his LoL (Lots of LEDs) Shields for the Arduino. He has a great post about his work with Charlieplexing which I’m currently consulting. Talk about serendipity!

In a way, the overlap between the needs of Hernani’s project and my own interests in lighting and internet-enabled lighting fixtures is serendipitous as well.  It’s great to be working on a project that is seemingly so diverse from my own projects, yet has so much overlap on the technical side.

It’s also been interesting to observe Hernani’s design approach/philosophy which stems from his graphic design background.  It seems like everything starts from the aesthetic: the documentation for the project has some of the nicest component diagrams I’ve seen; and even his calendar is created in Illustrator