Twitr Janus is created

It lives!

I must stop watching films like Promethius...

Twitr Janus is a 2-way communication puppet with remote animatronic control built on common technologies (well, it will be eventually!)
When finished it will be a physical avatar that can be controlled remotely to interact with people over the Internet. 


Basic objectives for this project are:

• to make a talking puppet head that can be manipulated remotely
• to build a completed working puppet
• as far as possible to build all this in open source software such as Arduino, Processing with communication using open data such as  APIs from common services such as Twitter and Google Docs 

This could take a while!
So far:

• it is just an Arduino puppet brain but no physical form yet
• it has a Twitter feed through which it can think and communicate @twitr_janus
• It has a puppetmaster brain running  Processing on a master computer that can control it across a serial port connection 

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A quick video showing the initial brain functions....

 

Processing script that is returning tweets using the Twitter API and passing them to the arduino which has a Firmata sketch loaded on it as firmware.

Initial thoughts on making Twitter drive a remote talking head

This is a "design" and I use that term loosely, that is an attempt to make a real head speak out tweets, from anywhere in the world - a sort of remote Twitter-to-speech-convertor!






























To make this work there are a number of challenges, which include:

• Connecting the head to the web, ideally remotely using wireless
• Once connected getting the last tweet from a specific Twitter account (the control account)
• Converting the tweet into speech
• Making the speech signal animate a mouth to simulate talking

This is visualised above!

The step for getting the last tweet from a twitter account

Step one of this I appear to have solved in Processing (which is Java-based), which should mean it works in arduino.  

Here's a snap shot of the function and the output that it can produce.

It's calling the Twitter API, then parsing it and splitting it to create an array, then calling one element of that array, which is the last Tweet from twitter.com/rosemarybeetle

For details on the Twitter API, see https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/statuses/user_timeline

Making an animated GIF from a pen and ink drawing

Cell-animated eye

A single cell grows into an eye.In the blink of itself, it’s extinct. See below for how this was made.

This was hand drawn using pen and ink.

Here is the original concept sketch. Pretty simple. Because this was for an animated GIF, it wanted to have a looping repeat feel to it, and have a beginning and end that worked together

I did not want to actually hand-animate this - far too long-winded. Instead the basic units of the drawing that would need to be animated separately were considered, and these were drawn more carefully using pen and ink.

 

These were then photographed with a digital camera and imported in Flash to manipulate them. Within Flash teh "Trace bitmap" function is used to create vectors from the imported image. The white areas are deleted, leaving just the ink lines, which can then be treated as any other shape in Flash. E.g. the blue iris colouring was added in Flash using a gradient fill.

It gets quite complex in Flash, but essentially each "thing" needs it's own layer, so it can be animated separately from other parts. This screenshot is a bit rubbish! 

Once I was happy I had recreated the design into a moving animation, it was exported using "Export Movie > animated GIF"

Animated GIF, made to upload to a public submissions space on the website for The Photographer's Gallery's Born in 1987: The Animated GIF exhibition.
http://joyofgif.tumblr.com/

HYPNO-PUG

HYPNO-PUG

Small, daft, jolly, stinky, grunty, lovely, friendly, dog.
Now available as an infinite loop self-hypnosis aide.

STARE DEEP INTO THIS GIF and feel the pug vibe evaporate your stresses.

TIP - look at the dog, but concentrate on the leaves.

Animated GIF, made to upload to a public submissions space on the website for The Photographer's Gallery's Born in 1987: The Animated GIF exhibition.

How this was made

This was created by importing an iPhone video of the pug into Flash, then drawing a large rectangular shape on a layer over it. The rectangle was created as a symbol in Flash, with it's alpha (transparency) value set to about 17% so you could still see the video underneath it. The colour of the rectangle was varied along the animation time using motion tweening to give the varying colorisation effect.

The 'Export as Movie' process in flash was used with the animated GIF setting.

Turning a "munny" into a USB cable extension socket - Part 2

This little beauty is a pimped version of an air-drying clay model munny my daughter made, but discarded.




It has been operated on, to insert a USB extension lead, so that when I get things off a USB memory stick into the computer, I can use this instead of finding the USB port on the PC - Much more enjoyable!

















The USB socket was stuck in the mouth, threaded through a hole throught the body (see previous post).

Having been repaired with builder's grab adhesive, the mough was filed and sanded to restore the original shape of the head.









The original model had slumped during drying, and was not stable.

It's centre of gravity was too far back, making it fall over backwards easily. To make it stable, a tail was built. A splint was added by screwing a galvanised wood screw into the model





More grab adhesive was packed round the screw and a tail modelled up around it

This was left to dry hard. This took about a week. The surface dries in a day, and although it can then be painted, the underlying adhesive is still plastic. This means it can easily be distorted during handling.

Once dry, it was filed and sanded as the mouth had been above.

Note, the model's right ear (on the left looking at it) had been damaged beyond repair and was deliberately left as a scar.




Once sanded, it was then wiped down to remove filing dust, then repainted back to its original scheme.  (left)

The black details were then reapplied using permanent marker pen (right)

Centipede chair design

Things I'd like to build one day volume 201522...

Although I'm not sure if I'll ever build this, I have had a design for a rather OTT chaise longue in my head for some years now. 

Essentially an excuse to build a more interesting recliner than your average chaise longue.

The basic concept is a jointed segmented chair body, with firm padded segments hinged together with free rotation along one axis allowing up/down hinging. 

This would then be dynamically held in position by some mechanism to apply a curling tension that tends to make the chair coil up if empty.  When sat on, the weight of gravity on the sitter would counter-balance this to provide a slightly sprung effect.

 

I have not thought through the exact way the tensioning would be applied . It would need to be adjustable to allow for different people's weights. It may also be necessary to have different  tensioning at different points. For example the lower half (seat area) may need to be under less tension that the area where the support for the lumbar region of the back is, etc.

This would need prototyping!!

I would also want some spring in the legs for dampening to provide a more comfortable seating experience.

As for materials - I rather fancy dark reddy-brown, antiqued and polished leather for the pads on the segments, with some sort of dark metal or possibly kevlar legs.  An aluminium/bronze type alloy perhaps?

Maybe one day!

Turning a "munny" into a USB cable extension socket

This is a hack job on one of my daughter's models. She has rejected it, but it's too lovely to discard, so here it is half way through being turned into a USB extension lead socket - an unnecessarily OTT socket maybe, but certainly more fun than a dull black plastic housing...

The mouth has been built up using grab adhesive, widely used in building to attach cladding, etc.. This is a surprisingly good modelling material: workable, but fast drying and hard when set




Working backwards here, before the final mouth remodelling above, the USB socket had to be fitted to the existing model.


This is a normal extension lead, placed into a cavity hacked out of the mouth, then glued in place with hot glue











The hack job to put the hole in the face is on the left.

the feed hole to get the cable in from below is on the right







here's the cable and original model before surgery!!

Mutant ceramic Munny

Mutant ceramic Munny
This one's not mine - it's a munny created in clay by my daughter but abandoned for not being true to her original vision/concept - I respect that artistic resolve!

However, it is quite sad to see such a fine object rejected. I couldn't bring myself to let it be binned, so I have secretly kept it and repaired its damaged ear and will finish off varnishing it.

I'll secret it away at work methinks!
Here its not quite finished with the varnish layer but looking pretty damn good I think!

Making relief-cut wine labels

This shot shows wine labels from the mid 1990s and the equipment used to make them. They are printed onto either gummed or self-adhesive labels from inked printing blocks. The blocks are rubber, mostly erasers, although the large block here (with "Apple" on it) was a rubber fender block from a van or truck.
 

Single-block printing

This block has been used twice. Originally it had the words reserve and the date (1997) on it. These were removed when it was used in a following year.


These labels were produced from it (not the Elder reserve 96, that was produced by photocopying an original drawing and then hand-colouring it.)

You can see the two variations - with and without the side text.

Multi-block printing

These labels are proofs to check alignment. The green apple" block was printed first, and the black smaller areas printed with a number of smaller blocks. The patterns are either oak leaves, elderflowers, the year (1995) or "Dry".

This is the main printing block. It's about 10cm by 8cm



Here it is alongside labels printed on the first level only using it...

 
...and here are the individual small blocks used to over-print the details. These are between about 10mm long by 8mm wide.