Minivegas

Last week I met Vincent Lindeboom and had a meeting with him at Baked Beans with MiniVegas for an awesome project.  This weekend I worked on a little visualisation with openFrameworks / openGL. 

27 July 2010

Juggling ball tracking

Had some minutes to work on my Juggling ball tracking visualisation. I'm working towards ball tracking application where I use the x,y coordinates of the juggling balls and time as the z coordinate. Then I export these positions to a .obj file and render it using i.e. Blender. Here are just some debug screenshots of early steps of the trail creation.

24 July 2010

Summer openFrameworks freakDay

This Saturday we had a nice small freakDay with Tim from Blendid and Jim from Strandjutter.net. Tim tweaked his code which creates different kinds of seguences (sin, cos, sawtooth, etc..).  I gave a little intro to openFrameworks for Jim and in a couple of minutes he was up and running and creating nice Lisajous shapes. I dove (again) in some 3D rotation techniques and maths for a small project I'm working on.

19 July 2010

First test with new lasers for touch table!

I just tried out the new, 850nm infrared lasers, I received from Aixiz. And wow! The result is just fantastic! I'm getting a 100% match, even with only one laser. The final table will have 4 lasers in each corner so I'm pretty sure the recognition of the fingers is settled now. Next step will be finding a good surface to beam on, and then we can start building our first prototype and start thinking about some nice applications!

15 July 2010

Touchtable

Received some designs from Tim who made sketches for our pre-prototype touch table. Slowly we our first version is coming to a real product. Something went wrong with the shipment of our new lasers so we had to wait for a month. Though it's been quite busy with other work so this wasn't a problem. I hope to have some time this week to hookup the hardware and do some tests; I'm pretty excided about how it's going to be. In the meanwhile I'm researching different methods of blob matching and tracking. I've been reading lots of papers on things like tennis and soccer ball tracking and the results are promosing.

11 July 2010

Blob tracking and labelling

Silently I'm working on a project for which I need some stable blob tracking and labelling. I googled around but didn't find blob trackers and labelling code which takes into account different matching algorithms. I'm working on this piece of code which will follow blobs and try to rematch them even when the blob went out of the frame for a couple of frames. It uses openCV and the blob tracking code is created as an addon for openFrameworks. It still needs some tweaking, though when the blob detection / segmentation is good I, almost all blobs are labelled correctly. I tested this with a video of around 1000 frames and I didn't find a mismatch!

11 July 2010

Twitter.. the final frontier

Wow, it's been a couple of weeks since I did my last post. I've been busy working on lots of websites for clients. Though this weekend I dove into text rendering with openFrameworks. I'd never expected that rendering text is such an advanced topic. After searching for a good text rendering engine I found actually just two good open source rendering libraries which have features for laying out (unicode) text. There is a library called FTGL which I tested first, though it seemed outdated. Therefore I searched for another text rendering library and found a library called Pango which is extremely nice! It's much more active developed than FTGL and used by a couple of big open source projects (such as Firefox on Linux). Currently I'm working on an addon for openFrameworks which working nicely atm.

Besides a text-rendering addon I created addon for the streaming twitter server... I'm still working on this and need to fine tune some things before I can make it publicly avaible in such a way it can be used by others.

Below are some images of little projects I'm working on.

6 July 2010

Etching a pcb for a display

Together with Martin and Thijs we've tried to etch a PCB using the toner transfer method. Yesterday we tried but had no luck. Somehow you cannot use a Brother printer for the toner transfer method. Luckily, after trying lots of different things, I found a post where someone said the Brother printers make the toner and so the plastic too hot which makes it very hard to transfer the ink to the pcb. Martin had a Samsung laser printer which we used today, and it just worked directly!

We created a design to drive a shiftregister. The PCB is okay, though not the best ever quality, but for a first time we're really happy. Next step is to solder it nicely and make it work to drive our 7-segmented LEDs.

20 June 2010

Clock and counter display

For a small weekend project we're working on a display for in our office. We use a couple of big 7-segmented LEDs we bought at farnell. Tim was so nice to make the wooden frame for us! Thanks a lot Tim. Together with Martin we'll fix the hardware this weekend. We're going to create our first custom made PCB as well! Then maybe, when we've some time left, I'll try and create our first Womby produced project, which will be a great test case.

18 June 2010

Screenshots from Breda Graphic Design Festival

Forgot to post a couple of screenshots from the application I created at the Graphic Design Festival Breda during the openFrameworks Lab. As I've mentioned before... it was a great week, meeting lots of nice and enthusiastic people working at the field of code and art!

8 June 2010