Category: Flotsam
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Picademy Exeter and Future Thinking for Social Living
Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and…
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Weavecoding Munich
Ellen’s exhibition in Munich was always going to be a pivotal event in the weavecoding project – one of the first opportunities to expose our work to a large audience. The Museum of casts of classical sculptures was the perfect context for the mythical aspects of weaving, overlooked by Penelope and friends with her subversive…
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Tangible programming: detecting flip, rotation and id with magnets
When we started designing the pattern matrix we wanted to include the possibility of encoding more than binary (which side is up) using the magnets. In order to test this, we made the bottom row of sensors with 4 in a square – the rest only have one sensor currently (to avoid blowing the budget…
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Foam Kernow open studio night
Some photos uploaded here from our open studio evening at Jubilee Warehouse (thanks to Andy Smith for the decent ones!). This was mainly an opportunity to invite old and new friends to have some food and a chat, Francesca ran a challenging taste experiment in the vein of Open Sauces and we had a number…
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Pattern matrix – putting it together
Here is a member of staff at Miners Court trying some tangible weave coding in the midst of our crafts area – at the moment it’s simply displaying the weave structure on the simulated warp weighed loom with a single colour each for warp and weft threads, the next thing is to get ‘colour &…
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Future Thinking for Social Living: Weavecoding in assisted housing
Our work on weavecoding is now reaching out to other uses and projects. One is Future Thinking for Social Living, run by Magda Tyżlik-Carver and Fiona Hackney. This research project aims to look at the relationship between wellbeing, home, making and technology and is centred on Miners Court, who provide assisted housing in Redruth in…
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Pattern Matrix hardware build
More photos from the Makernow fablab, the pattern matrix weavingcoding device is starting to take shape! All schematics, 3d printing shapes and plans will be released soon as open source hardware on the weavecoding repo.
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Screenless music livecoding
Programming music with flotsam – for the first time, it’s truly screen-less livecoding. All the synthesis is done on the Raspberry Pi too (raspbian release in the works). One of the surprising things I find with tangible programming is the enforced scarcity of tokens, having to move them around provides a situation that is good…
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New tangible weavecoding device – pattern matrix
We’re starting construction of version 2 of the flotsam tangible programming device, specialised to weaving – and henceforth known as the ‘pattern matrix’. This will be tested during May at our upcoming performance/workshop/residency at Munich’s Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke (Museum of Casts of Classical Sculpture) with the Coding weaves project, and then for later…
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Adventures with i2c
In order to design the next version of the flotsam hardware I need to make it cheaper and easier to build. The existing hardware was very cheap in terms of components but expensive in terms of time it took to construct! With this lesson learned and with a commission on the horizon I need to…