electro!!

So this is all about electronical stuff/physical computing. I remember to have this electronical experimental set as a kid and I also did some soldering, but that was quite a long time ago.. so this lessons were to refresh a little bit of my knowledge.

The first electro!!_session was with Einar.

A classmate of mine who is veeery much into this electronical stuff. You can see it on his table, or rather all over his table. Interesting place..

However, we learnt the basics of soldering and about Resistors, Transistors and Potentiometers.

Very much fun to fumble around with these electronics and even more fun to watch Einar takin apart a RC-Car to get the components whose are necessarily to buildt a remote controlled blinkin light. We also connected it to the arduino_board, a very interesting tool, with which you can make your computer talk to your electronics and vice versa!

“Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.” (http://www.arduino.cc/)

Check out this page to get to know more about the arduino_board and it´s possiblities!

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The second part of this electro!!_course was with Tom Igoe, he´s kind of a superguru when it comes to physical_coumputing, processing and arduino_boards. You should check out his website:

 

http://www.tigoe.net/intro.shtml.

He gave some basic lessons about electronics and then quickly switched to some serious processing_programming while using the above mentioned arduino_board to get physical_electronics comunicate with the pc. Unfortunately I was way behind my classmates, cause they allready had processing lessons in the last year.

“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.” (http://www.processing.org/)

So why I was busy figuring out what´s what on the screen, they buildt up nice little devices, like door_opening_systems controlled by the pc and fancy motors. I was stuck to my LED´s flashing and while using some potentiometers making them glow brighter or blinking..