Joe Pietruch's Blog

As my final project for Physical Computing, I created a simple Flash game that uses the Nintendo Wiimote (four of them, actually) as an input device. The screen shows a grid of squares. Each Wiimote is associated with a color, and players point and press buttons to flip the squares to their individual colors. Whichever player has the most squares of his color at the end of the game wins.

It was interesting to work on this project because of the multi-user aspects. Handles for the different user actions needed to be abstracted so as to be associated with different users.  I also created two sets of handles so I could choose between Wiimote and mouse control when debugging – rather than having to hook up the Wiimote every time – and for systems at school where I don’t have privileges to install a bluetooth stack willy-nilly.

This project also served as a testbed for future interactions. Working with the Wiimote as a user input device for the RIT Collaboritorium project  is more pheasible now. I created a set of four different IR beacons to be centered underneath each screen of the DOME. The IR beacons serve as anchors so the Wiimote knows which way it is pointing, and also (because each one is different) at which screen it is pointing. The pointing gesture is not literal, but suffices enough to trick the user into being happy.

Single-Player Mouseable Tile Game

Read the rest of this entry »

Another project was a brief excursion into the world of electric motors. In this particular (short!) project, we were tasked with creating something simple with a motor, stepper, or servo.

I had originally wanted to do something through Flash with the servo, but found that to be too difficult for the scope of the project. The main reason for this is that Flash is rather atrocious when it comes to controlling time precisely. The PWM calls to the servo motor required mili- and micro-second accuracy, something Flash just doesn’t have.

As a substitute, I scaled things back to just using that cute volume slider from the Blink project to control the rotation of the servo: all the way left, all the way right, and everywhere in between.

Motor Code Read the rest of this entry »

It’s only been, what, 9 weeks since I finished the Blink project for Physical computing? *sighs* I didn’t do myself any favors this Spring quarter at RIT. Seriously.

Anyway, as a “Hello, world!” with the Arduino, our task was to modify the basic LED Blink program to do something somewhat more interesting. For mine, I used the volume slider from an old walkman, and a bend sensor to modify the blinking pattern of a series of LEDs. The volume slider controlled how many LEDs were lit, and the bend sensor affected how quickly the blink occurred.

(could’ve sworn that image was around here somewheres…)

Blink Code Read the rest of this entry »

I just did the whole Askimet SPAM filter thing. I kinda feel behind the times on a lot of things, SPAM detection being one of them.

I let my moderating go for a little over 3 weeks, and come back to find 8429 comments in moderation. That’s fine with me, because none of them made it to my visible pages. It was not fine, however, because that many posts cannot be edited all at once (the page times out before they are all loaded, and the moderate button is at the BOTTOM! of the page), nor is it desirable to go through them 20 at a time.

Fortunately I’m a New Media student, and New Media students know MySQL. I went in to my database and removed all comments received since the last time I moderated. It took about 3 seconds.

Askimet requires comment-makers register. On your first comment I approve or deny you, which affects how your subsequent comments are handled.

I apologize if you had made a legitimate comment during the last 3 weeks. Your comment was a casualty of SPAM. The future is brighter, though. (spam Spam SPAM spammity SPAM Spam spam spam *operatically* Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam… )