dave's blog of art and programming

Category: android

  • Building software for farmers

    During the summer I’ve been working with the Swarm Knowledge Hub at Cornwall’s Duchy College. We’ve been building an android application that forms part of a scheme to highlight the value of organic fertilisers compared to costly and unsustainable synthetic fertilisers. The core of the software is a calculator based on tables provided by DEFRA…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 3: The anti-cloud – towards bike to bike mesh networking

    [Continued from part 2] One of the philosophies that pre-dates my involvement with the sonic bikes project is a refusal of cloud technologies – to avoid the use of a central server and to provide everything required (map, sounds and computation) on board the bikes. As the problems with cloud technology become more well known,…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 2: FM accelerometer transmissions

    [Continued from part 1] On day one, after we introduced the project and the themes we wanted to explore, Ryan Jordan had a great idea of how to prototype the bike-bike communication using FM radio transmissions. He quickly freeform built a short range FM transmitter powered by a 9v battery. The next thing we needed…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab: Part 1

    Time to report on the sonic bike hacklab Kaffe Matthews and I put on in AudRey HQ in Hackney. We had a sunny and stormy week of investigation into sonic bike technology. After producing three installations with sonic bikes, the purpose of the lab was to open the project up to more people with fresh…

  • Little J – many ears to the ground

    The essence of the Little J journalism project with Behaviour is to prototype things that make it as easy as possible for people to report stories and get them seen by journalists working for small local papers. Over the last week we’ve got the site and database up and running, created a new Facebook app…

  • Android Camera Problems

    The DORIS marine mapping platform is taking shape. For this project, touch screens are not great for people wearing gloves in small fishing boats – so one of the things the android app needs to do is make use of physical keys. In order to do that for taking pictures, I’ve had to write my…

  • Doris: Lobster mapping

    A new project, coming from Borrowed Scenery’s Zizim project, converted into a scientific research tool in collaboration with the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at Exeter University and Helsinki University. Doris is named after the sea nymph from Greek mythology, and will be used for mapping Lobster catches on fishing boats so researchers working…

  • scheme bricks 2

    A new version of scheme bricks is under way, planned to be tested out with slub on the Mozilla Fest Party, then taken across the Atlantic for some more livecoding action in Mexico City! New things include blocks with depth – cosmetic for the moment, but I plan to prototype some new ideas based on…

  • Aniziz and Zizim

    The online part of the borrowed scenery project is an experiment in geotagging plants and plant related locations via a website/app called Zizim (the compass) combined with a multiplayer online game called Aniziz (the soil) where you can interact with the plants people have found. Having spent the last couple of months developing them, they…

  • Borrowed Scenery

    I spent last week working on various activities associated with the Electrified festival in Ghent, which included a mix of plant care, games dev, low level android audio hacking, beagleboard-bike fixing. Here are some photos of the Borrowed Scenery installation/physical narrative, home of the mysterious patabotanists and temporary research laboratory for FoAM – excellent for…