Digital Graffiti – Spray Demo

December 19th, 2008 • 6 comments AIR, ActionScript, Flash, Physical Computing, Projects
Tags: ActionScript, AIR, Arduino, AS3, Physical Computing, RFID

The canvas with the van is not very nice, but just to show you a demo of the spray can. sorry for my bad spraying skills. see a description of the project here.

Digital Spraycan – Demo

December 12th, 2008 • 1 comment Physical Computing, Projects
Tags: Arduino, Physical Computing, RFID

I did this demo video earlier this year while developing the spray can for my thesis project. The RGB LED wasn’t bright enough so I replaced it with a super bright one later on and moved it to the top of the can to lighten up the donut.

Arduino and the RFID reader ID-12

December 8th, 2008 • 32 comments Physical Computing
Tags: Arduino, Physical Computing, RFID

This tutorial is all about wiring the RFID reader ID-12 and retrieving RFID tags via an Arduino board. There are already a few good tutorials with working code out there, but all of them are quite basic and therefore I want to show you how to use it in more complex applications.

There are basically 2 major differences in comparison to other implementations:

1. software serial
The ID-12 uses a serial connection to send the tags. All the other implementations are using the hardware serial pin (RX) to retrieve the information and send it to the computer. The problem of this setup with the ID-12 blocking the receive pin is that you can’t send any data from the computer to the arduino board anymore. This implementation is using a software serial connection on an other I/O pin in order to maintain bidirectional communication.

2. RFID tag removed
The ID-12 has no native method to determine whether a RFID tag is still in range or has been removed already. With a little workaround you can get this information as well.

but enough talking, get this thing started:
Read more »

Digital Graffiti – A Subculture Conquers Interactive Worlds

December 1st, 2008 • 15 comments AIR, ActionScript, Flash, Physical Computing, Projects
Tags: ActionScript, AIR, Arduino, AS3, Physical Computing, RFID

Finally I delivered my thesis project I did in cooperation with Less Rain. The subject was »Digital Graffiti – A Subculture Conquers Interactive Worlds« and it’s all about experimenting with different input devices for a physical, digital graffiti installation. The result is an Adobe AIR application using either the computer mouse, the Nintendo Wiimote or »VandalSpray« to paint digital canvases. VandalSpray is a digital spray can specifically designed for this purpose. It implements the attributes of a real spray can or at least trys to achieve them as natural as possible. Except a turnable bottom for changing the color, VandalSpray has no other interfacing elements than its real counterpart and therefore you don’t have to learn and explore the functionality first, because you intuitively know how to use it.

VandalSpray features includes:

• exchangeable caps
• color display
• digital valve system to vary the amount of »paint« coming out of the cap
• different colors
• wireless

The spray can is built upon the Arduino platform and uses different sensors and electronic modules like a RFID reader, a super bright RGB LED, a Rotary Encoder, a Bluetooth module, a force sensitive resitor (FSR) and loads of wires and solder to implement the desired behavior. For tracking the spray can I use a Wiimote and the WiiFlash ActionScript 3 library and server, but this could also be replaced by a standard webcam and an adequate tracking implementation.
Because I didn’t want to put some kind of speaker in the spray can (there was no space left anyway) the spray sound is generated from the AIR app and output on the speakers of the notebook.

VandalSpray vs. Montana spray can

VandalSpray electronics

More
http://blog.formatlos.de/2008/12/12/digital-spraycan-edemo/
http://blog.formatlos.de/2008/12/19/digital-graffiti-spray-demo/