Ant Ramm

I’ve been looking into collision algorithms for a game of Pong I am going to be writing. I found a really good guide to circle to circle collisons.

I was looking for libraries to do vector manipulation and stumbled across GNU GSL - a scientific library, written in C, that includes vector and matrix manipulation classes.

I love the Ruby language as readers of my other blog would know. I found Ruby bindings to GSL. To install this on OS X Leopard with MacPorts installed you download the Ruby GSL bindings then:

% sudo port install gsl plotutils
% tar zxf rb-gsl-1.10.3.tar.gz
% cd rb-gsl-1.10.3
% ruby setup.rb config
% ruby setup.rb setup
% sudo ruby setup.rb install

And your good to go!

I’ve decided that it’s a good idea for me to start from the beginning. I’ve been dabbling with electronics since I was at senior school, but I’m sure I’ve ever completely understood the basics. Over the weekend I decided to start from the beginning again. I’ve got a 1989 book called Electronic Systems which I borrowed when I was at school, but never got around to returning. It certainly seems to give a good introduction into the world of electronics.

Also Dave Checkley and Rich Hubbard have recommended that I get a copy of The Art Of Electronics which I’ve found in the library at the TIC where I work. I’m off to get it, and the student workbook out later.

So, armed with a borrowed oscilloscope and three large textbooks I’m planning on teaching myself up to first year degree level electronics in the next few months.

Should be interesting…

Two or three years ago a few friends and I said wouldn’t it be great if we could get together a group of people and put on an event which involved music, dance, performance, poetry, multimedia art, lighting AND make the audience feel like they’d been taken on a journey. After meeting in a pub once a week for a number of weeks we decided to call our group ‘Project X Presents’.

Since then we’ve been meeting at least once a week and have put on two crazy events (you can read all about them on our site). Each time we’ve put on an event it has got more and more adventurous and we’ve concentrated slightly more on a different aspect. The first concentrated on the music, the second performance. This summer we’re planning to throw all this together with a good dollop of interactive art and visuals.

We’ve got lots of ideas and are likely to be using ATMega168 series chips and the wonderful Arduino Open Source electronics prototyping platform to provide the basis for a number of these installations. They will probably be connected together in a grid type system with XBee ZigBee adapters by MaxStream. Some of these devices will be directly outputting to either MIDI or DMX512 to connect audience input to the projected visuals. Custom Processing and/or Max/MSP patches will also be conceptualised, designed and written to tie in with input from these devices.I plan on keeping a log what is happening with these projects via this blog.