Here we see MFADT student Simeon Poulin playing with the whiteboard we cooked up for the first Wakatta test charrette.

Couple of awesome updates. The most important is that Shawn and Kelly from ASU helped Kyle and me set up the SMALLab installation at Parsons. Very, very cool.

Distortion: Me with a checkerboard as the SMALLab team tries to fix the distortion on the fisheye lenses.

Kyle and I got processing communicating with the system in about a half hour and made a couple of nice sketches with two balls tracking. Should be a good kick off for making lessons starting two weeks from now. Here's a YouTube video of that:

Me with a checkerboard as the SMALLab team tries to fix the distortion on the fisheye lenses.

A wearable LED wrist band that glows or blinks red, based on button presses. A decent stand-in for a wearable computing device,

Our Mill of the Mind project, in which Sims are subjected to the deprivations of the Milgram experiment, got a mention in ARTnews. Awesome!

A new cell phone? Ho-hum. A new cell phone running on free software? It's been done, but you've got my attention. A new cell phone running on free software, using completely open hardware? And they'll give you the tools to bust it open and make it easy to solder stuff onto its I2C port? RAWK!

Kinda makes you wonder... what would YOU hook up to a cell phone, if you could? Gets me wondering about some of the tech I saw in Malawi, particularly in the health sector.

This week, I started building the prototype of my Pleech, the power leeching wind turbine.

The first thing I did was to assemble all the parts I could find. These included:

Pringles Can (cut lengthwise)

Two Used CDs

Chrome Paper Towel Holder

5/8 in. Dowel: (cut to length with two nails driven into each side and snipped to make a needle bearing)

8 Ceramic Magnets: (oriented in alternating North/South configuration)

400 Ft. 30 gauge magnet wire: (made into 8 loops of approx 275 2 in. windings)

Various Electronics: (including a bridge rectifier)

With these pieces together, I began the assembly process.

Heh. So, I just realized that I forgot to tag the last entry which would have put the previous Process post appear in the MS:I blog area. Dumb. No wonder Yury didn't see it.

I'm thinking about the Savonius Turbine in particular because of projects like
PicoTurbine.

At 300 windings per stator, the basic version of the PT should be able to produce between two and three volts, according to the authors. The plans have a pretty great discussion of the possible power coming out of the turbine.

For my Pleech project, I am trying to develop a low-cost, low-power, easily assembled generator that can be fixed to walls, fan outlets, and other infrastructure in order to generate environmentally friendly electricity for physical-computing graffiti and sentiti applications.

(Note: "sentiti" is my own coinage. It refers to any illicit sensor that can be placed in much that same way as graffiti. Think of it as an unauthorized reading as opposed to an unauthorized writing.)

Sim Art - New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer - [My del.icio.us]

Nice blurb about the Sims show and our project in particular on New York Magazine's site. Both Inti Einhorn and Becky Heritage have great quotes!