Category: Flotsam
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Tangible weavecoding at the Makernow Fablab
Demoing the flotsam tangible livecoding device at the Makernow Fablab in Penryn. Future revisions of the hardware will need to fix some of the problems identified in testing as well as work in gallery exhibitions we have planned for next year.
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Tangible livecoding tests in the wild, and material as type in programming
Last week I took the flotsam tangible livecoding system to my programming tutoring lesson for some first tests with the real experts. To provide some background, we started a while back with Raspberry Pi, messing around with the Minecraft API and python and we’ve recently moved on to laptops and pygame. I arrived with the…
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Learning about thinking and weaving in Leeds and Sheffield
The second week of intense work on weavingcodes/codingweaves took place in the north of England, and began with a talk at the New Mechanics Institute show and tell meeting in Leeds. This was a good place to pick up from the previous week in Denmark as it included a talk on pixel art from the…
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Flotsam: A prototype screenless livecoding language
Two languages are working with Flotsam, the new name for the prototype screenless tangible programming language I’ve been building (which comes from the fact it’s largely made from driftwood). It’s somehow already been featured on the Adafruit blog! The circuit seems to be fully debugged now, with short circuits fixed – which took a little…
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A screenless programming language: putting it all together
More background on this project here. This is the finished Raspberry Pi interface board, most of the circuitry here is an LED driver to light up one of the 32 programming blocks as they are being scanned, or in any pattern required depending on the needs of the particular programming language in use. The small…
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Screenless programming language: assembling the plug panel
Never seen so many VGA ports, ironic perhaps. It’s great that it’s transparent, but I’m regretting the material choice for the panel – acrylic is horrible to work with and leaves behind lots of microplastics pollution I have to carefully collect up. Lesson learnt for next time, lots more soldering to do now – then…
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Building a screenless programming language for the Raspberry Pi #6
Following on from the last in this mini series, the giant 16 byte multiplexer is finished and tested – lots of head scratching due to shorts and wonky solder joints (it’s amazing how sensitive CMOS logic is, interference on accidental free pins causes strange effects) and I’ve replaced the breadboard with a new interface board…
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Screenless programming language #5
Update after the last post. After many hours soldering 75% of the board is complete! The Pi can now address a whopping 12 bytes of data. After thinking about it for a while, and checking with the languages I’m planning to use – I’ve decided to double the number of instruction ‘slots’ by halving the…
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Screen-less programming language (#3)
Since the last update I’ve connected the Raspberry Pi to the board, and after a bit of debugging I have a python script that polls bytes (more accurately 4 bit ‘nibbles’) via the GPIO ports from 16 addresses. I didn’t blow up the Pi, although I did cause hard resets a couple of times with…
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Some tangible programming language research (#2)
Following on from yesterday’s post – here’s a random selection of some (publicly accessible) tangible programming research. Timothy Scott McNerney: Tangible Programming Bricks: An approach to making programming accessible to everyone Timothy S. McNerney: From turtles to Tangible Programming Bricks: explorations in physical language design Juan Gabriel Tirado: Tangible Syntaxes: Exploring embodied and tangible I/O…