Heres the code we have so far for our Lumenotbots.
If you get the chance, have a look over it before we head over to the Workantile on Sunday.
We will meet there at noon.
We will be coding with Atmel Studio 6, free download but windows only (I’m going to try virtual machine it).
Seeyall then!
This evening, Professor Michael Gurevich’s PAT 452 students presented their interactive design projects.
The students presented the devices that they have been working on for the first half of semester. These devices were physically interactive devices that musicians could use to create music and sound experiences, beyond keyboards and mouses, and perform in front of an audience.
A great presentation by Professor Gurevich and his students!
Elona Van Gent’s Creative Process (UARTS 250) course is gearing up to make digital collage work with Adobe Photoshop. One of my favorite artists work fell into examples of how the human face can be broken down into something unrecognizable – American painter Chuck Close.
An interesting fact I learned today was that Close has face blindness where he doesn’t recognize faces. Perhaps this is an advantage for breaking his portraits down into circles and Xs?
Video: Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress
Every Sunday in the month of March, Festifools are hosting their Luminary making workshops at the Workantile on South Main Street from 10am to 5pm.
Mark Tucker the organiser kindly agreed to having us show up and work on our project alongside those creating their own luminaries. I popped in to see the space last Sunday and it looked like a lot of fun with some cool lantern sculptures and lots of people milling about.
So we will be there this Sunday to code and show off our Lumenotbots in progress, come along!
Just to let y’all know that we will be having our Lumenotbot public workshops at All Hands Active in downtown Ann Arbor at 5pm on Friday 22nd of March.
The workshop will start at 5pm and we have the space until 9pm.
We will most likely have another workshop on Friday 29th too.
So pop it into your diaries!
So we made 2 boards as soon as they arrived today.
There were some issues about the legs of the microcontroller as well as the fact that it had a massive ground pad on its underside which could short out the paths that are on the circuit board… but after testing one out we seemed to have gotten lucky that it doesn’t cause a problem. We just need to make sure to test each mounted microcontroller before finishing each board.
Roger is going to make a few more in i3. We now have enough to do some basic testing and the boards have successfully “Hello world”-ed so lets get cracking!
We will have to arrange a manufacturing day to do the bulk of these but for the meantime we need to get working on the code. They require an ftdi connector to upload code (we can get our hands on a few of these) and we’ll be using Atmel Studio 6 (windows only unfortunately) to code.
No we just have to test the power on a few of them.. then if alls good we can make a few demo ones before putting them all together.
Details to come!
What is creative process? Why teach it, and how?
The visual arts section of the University’s Creative Process course gathers each Wednesday in the Design Lab 1. Creative Process is an interdisciplinary course dedicated to the exploration of creative problem solving through hands-on activities. We sat down with Elona Van Gent who teaches the visual arts section of the class. Our conversation is excerpted below.
What is the creative process course?
Creative Process is a a UR arts class. A few years ago, created a new curriculum category called University Arts open to anyone in the university. The focus of the course is to take the students through a multidisciplinary faculty team to teach creative process.
What do you hope students will take away from this class?
From the syllabus: this is a class where students are encouraged in an interdisciplinary way, to explore their own creativity. Faculty with training in Architecture, Visual Arts, Music and Engineering will teach students their own approaches to creativity within their fields, and encourage students to find their own approaches (in and out of their current stated disciplines). Students will have short 2-week “workshops” with each faculty member, as well as work on a Final Project, either on their own, or in an interdisciplinary team of their own creation.
What is the value-add of an interdisciplinary learning environment?
It’s such a huge topic. Creative process is this big thing. One of the goals is to give students a variety of creative process approaches and let them combine and extrapolate techniques from them hopefully to apply to their particular area of expertise and to life in general.
What are the unique challenges of teaching a class on creative process?
It’s nebulous. It’s complicated… even if you go to the research there is no mutuality agreed upon model of creative process. We’re still figuring out what it is and how to break it down into understandable chunks and how to have people practice it in order to get good at it. One of the challenges is to get out of the mindset that some people are creative and some people aren’t. we want to get out of that and get into a mindset that this is something where you can develop skills and get good at it. That doesn’t make it any less magic than if you think of it as an innate ability.
How has the class developed/morphed over time?
The course has gotten a lot more organized. Getting eighty students distributed around campus at the right time is complicated… so the logostics of the course have taken some figuring out. The thing we’re still working on is figuring out how best to take advantage of the fact that there are multiple factually… we haven’t tapped the full potential of the structure of the class.