tangible programming – dave's blog of art and programming

Viruscraft: tangible interface electronics

We needed to get a working prototype of our tangible interface running for the second Viruscraft workshop, so that we could have a complete system up and running from the custom hardware to the on-screen game world for people to test and give us feedback on how it worked.

You can read Amber’s full report on this workshop here.

A recap on how this is supposed to work – we need to plug different types of ligand (protrusions on the outside of viruses that allow them to attach to cells in order to infect them) into a large wooden model virus capsid (the body of the virus) that we are building for use in exhibitions. The choices of shape you pick affects which host species your virus can infect on a simulation that is being run in real time. The best ligand shapes to use will change over time, as the hosts adapt to your mutations.

We decided to start by using a simple conductivity system to detect which ligand shape is plugged in, with three sets of three pairs of conductive pads on each triangle face of the capsid that can be connected (or not) with strips of copper on the bases of the ligands. This means we can detect between 7 different shapes in total. It’s very cheap and simple, but a conductivity measurement like this will never be 100% accurate, which is why we are doing it in triplicate – the redundancy allows us some leeway if they are not plugged fully in, but this also results in a lot of connections we need test.

We started by using 6 digital inputs on a Raspberry Pi GPIO – just reading two sets of connectors on one triangle. Even with the triple redundancy, the connection across the pads is never going to be perfectly conductive, so in order to increase the sensitivity of the digital inputs (which need quite a bit of voltage to register as ‘on’ without extra circuitry) we added gigantic pull up resistors (22 Mohm). This means they default to on (+5V) but with very little current passing through – so a tiny amount of conductivity to ground will drop the voltage enough to register as ‘off’. This means they are so sensitive that you can trigger a change just by bridging the gap on the pads with your fingers – this is exactly the same way that MakeyMakeys work.

Based on our previous experiences with the self-etched PCBs we designed some neater ones that we could get manufactured so they would be consistent. In the meantime we have also recently got our hands on a CNC mill we can use for future PCB construction like this – but haven’t quite had time to get it set up for production yet.

The next step was to come up with a more scalable way to read the signals, by moving everything onto a ATmega328 microcontroller – which is much cheaper than a Pi and suitable to embed in a custom circuit. The first plan was to keep it simple for the workshop and use it’s 18 of its i/o pins to directly read just 2 triangles, so we could quickly get on with the job of connecting it to the game world. We didn’t have time to get a PCB specifically designed for this, so I used strip board for rapid construction, just a few days before the workshop. To speed things up a bit I tried using KiCAD to help with the layout design.

Although KiCAD is not really designed for strip board it works quite well if you stick to a few rules. You set the grid to 2.54mm (1/10 inch) and use the lower copper side to represent the strips – drawing each one as you need them and leaving spaces to indicate where you need to cut the copper tracks. The top side copper layer is used to plan where the jumper wires will be placed to connect across the tracks where needed. The idea is to minimise these wires to make it simpler to build – and KiCAD is good for checking the circuit is correct for you as you organise everything. We then printed each side out on paper for reference, and glued the bottom side to the board to indicate where to cut the tracks.

One advantage of prototyping in strip board rather than making PCBs is that it’s much easier to modify things in an adhoc manner. For example, halfway through building this we made the wooden parts of the capsid structure, and thought it would be a better demonstration to use 3 or more faces for the workshop if we could. At this point we could use a multiplexer chip to allow the microcontroller to select which triangle it is reading and share the 9 digital pins between all the triangles connected, in order to read each one in turn. This would mean we could use a single microcontroller to read 16 (or more) entire triangles (144 digital signals) rather than just 2 (18 signals) which is probably be enough in fact for the final design.

To do this we used a 74HC4067 multiplexer chip left over from the flotsam tangible programming project. These work like a general purpose digitally controlled switch, allowing you to connect a single pin to one of 16 connections and select them using 4 inputs as a binary address. We can now use this chip to select which face is connected to ground, meaning that the microcontroller would only be able to read the connections for that one face – even though they are all sharing the same microcontroller input pins.

This seemed to work well on the breadboard, but has a big problem that in the pre-workshop rush gave me a frustrating time to figure out precisely. When a selected face has a connection on the same position as another face which is currently unselected by the multiplexer, the ground connection loops back round the circuit to the unselected face too. If that unselected face also has a connection across the pads in a location that the selected face doesn’t, then the microcontroller will mistakenly read that as a connection signal as well as it will be grounded and effectively read both of them at the same time.

The problem is that this only happens in particular arrangements of ligand codes, which means the interference doesn’t always occur. In order to prevent this grounding problem where it ‘leaks out’ to the rest of the circuit the fix is to add diodes to each separate face connection, which only allow the current to move in one direction.

So this simple conductivity system turned out to not be quite so simple as hoped!

Emergency diodes…

Connecting this to the simulation, which is running in the browser (entering the world of the web) was actually much less of a problem than that of stray electrons. The microcontroller is connected to a Raspberry Pi via i2c serial for data – this setup is borrowed from the pattern matrix, which means the Raspberry Pi can read part the microcontroller’s memory. A python script reads the state of the ligands over i2c and overwrites a text file each time a change is detected. This text file is accessible to a web server that is also hosting the game. The code running on the browser (in this case on the workshop participant’s laptops, but eventually on an exhibition computer) reads this text file every second and updates the virus that is used for the simulation automatically when it is changed by a player.

In the workshop we used the Raspberry Pi to serve the game over a wifi hotspot that people could connect their devices to, and we could get participants to test the tangible interface by adding/changing ligands. As they did this it would mutate the virus running in all their simulation worlds so they could see what was happening on the physical virus – and the hosts would get infected by the new virus on each player’s world.

How to design a tangible programming language – Pattern Matrix at Algomech (part 2)

Once we acknowledge that weaving and programming are part of the same technological timeline, we can begin to look at the history of weaving as a eight thousand year long tale of human relationship with digital technologies – and use this long view to research new approaches to software engineering, a field with a much less developed history and many interesting problems to solve.

Using augmented reality to display dynamic information on a tangible programming language.

(Follows Part 1 here.)

One of our threads of investigation is using the pattern matrix as a general purpose tangible programming system – one that we can use for controlling swarms of robots, programming different types of weaving systems and describing complex processes, such as live musical systems.

The magnetic system on the new pattern matrix consists of four hall effect sensors on every location you can place a block. There are four unique ways you can arrange the magnets – which means four types of programming block are possible. As we want to reuse these physical blocks for various uses and programming languages, we decided to use abstract shapes to denote the block types to begin with. Each of the four blocks can be rotated and flipped to give 32 total possible orientations, or symbol ‘tokens’:

All combinations of token orientation with four magnets

However, only 16 of these orientations are actually unique. We can only determine flip orientation on the circular block, and only rotation on the rectangular and triangular ones – where flipping them makes no difference to the magnets. The square block is a kind of special one, as we can tell both rotation and flip orientation, so it can represent eight tokens in total all by itself:

All unique tokens and orientations possible. With mid-grey shapes the flip (which side is up) is irrelevant.

It’s important to note at this point that the parallels with tablet weaving are no coincidence: rotating and flipping arrangements of four binary elements for this magnetic system are the same actions as those performed when weaving using tablets. Weaving in the pattern matrix is more than a subject, it’s built directly into it’s mode of operation.

Next we need to test the applicability of this tangible programming system for wider uses. The other cultural phenomena the Penelope project is involved in is livecoding – so is it possible to use the pattern matrix to introduce a weaving centred programming technology in a very different context, not to describe weaving but to generate music in a performance such as an Algorave? This is something that Ellen first pioneered at our weavecoding performance at The Museum of casts of classical sculptures in Munich, but the new pattern matrix has better capabilities for a general purpose programming language.

Having 16 states of four blocks is indeed limiting for a language, but not too limiting. Some types of programming language, such as a string rewriting system like a Lindenmayer system are particularly well suited to this. They are also surprisingly Turing complete languages, able to represent any other programming language in existence, given enough space and time.

Here is a quick example of how this works in text form – a string rewriting system is simply a list of search-replace actions that are carried out in a consistent order. The original example, used to model the growth pattern of algae – consists of a starting string: “A” and two replacement rules, replace “A” with “AB” and replace “B” with “A”. If we run these two rules over and over on the same bit of text we gradually ‘grow’ a pattern like this:

n = 0 : A n = 1 : AB n = 2 : ABA n = 3 : ABAAB n = 4 : ABAABABA n = 5 : ABAABABAABAAB n = 6 : ABAABABAABAABABAABABA n = 7 : ABAABABAABAABABAABABAABAABABAABAAB

On the pattern matrix we use four of the rows to represent four different rules that replicate in this manner (each made of 5 possible symbols, as it’s a 5×5 grid), which we run 8 times on the starting string (A) to create a musical sequence. Four of the tokens represent these rules (A,B,C and D), the remaining tokens represent musical actions – changes in pitch, rests and sound triggers. There is massive variety of potential patterns, you can control the amount of recursion by the number of rule reference tokens you use – to control the resulting length of the sequences, and thus the complexity of the music. Interestingly we also need a ‘no operation’ (NOP) instruction that does nothing – as in low level assembler languages. We need this as a way to be able to shift timing in the musical sequence by one instruction.

With a tangible programming language like this it’s also very important to consider how you categorise instructions by shape – as you can quickly switch between similar operations by simply rotating or flipping tokens, while switching between different shapes takes longer (as you need to pick up a new block) so should represent bigger changes if possible.

Four rules are plenty for generating hugely complex sequences, so we can use the fifth bottom row to control global parameters like scale, synchronisation options (for our slub collaborative sync protocol) or switch between more banks of sounds for greater variety.

Slub performance including the pattern matrix at the Brighton British Science Festival Algorave

The first time we tried this out was at the British Science Festival Algorave in Brighton. A projection was set up with a camera to show the pattern matrix being used, and while technically everything went fine (other than some syncing difficulties), it highlighted a key problem with tangible programming languages. With no dynamic feedback other than the state of the blocks on the pattern matrix, it’s very difficult to tell what is happening during a performance, it’s hard to understand what musically is resulting from the changes you are making.

In order to find a way around this we designed an augmented reality ‘layer’ to place over the pattern matrix, which gives feedback on the currently triggered notes and the paths between the recursive string production rules. We use fluxus and it’s AR feature, which was written by Gabor Papp – which is based on the ARToolkit library. We use a printed out marker to find the plane and camera scale of the centre of the pattern matrix in the image from a USB camera. Once this is done the marker can be removed (as neither the camera or pattern matrix moves) and we can use millimetres as units and place objects over the block locations in 3D space. When the sensors detect a change we can display this new information, also updating the current position in the sequence playback to give feedback on the current sound playing.

Pattern matrix livecoding as part of slub performance at the Algomech Algorave. Pix thanks to Dan Hett

As an initial trial the AR improved things when first tried out at the Algomech Algorave in Sheffield, it makes the pattern matrix easier to understand and perform with – and also provides some feedback for the audience in a projection. In a last minute change we switched from Latin characters to Linear A, an undeciphered ancient Greek script – a reference to Flavia’s work on the Penelope project. This is actually preferable to Latin characters as the musical language represents meaning in a way that that actual glyph used is irrelevant – it’s better if it can’t be ‘read’ or confused with another meaning by anyone (still alive).

So it seems that AR could be one of the items in our toolbox for further tangible programming experiments. Perhaps we can better explain the structural changes caused by livecoding the weaving notation for the warp weighted loom by having a dynamic weave structure ‘floating’ on top of the tokens, alongside the loom simulation. This could also be of use for describing tablet weaving actions with these blocks, which would need to be more abstract than the binary weaving notation.

Another area to explore is the design of the blocks themselves, moving away from the abstract shapes, we can design them for specific purposes. Similar to our work on viruscraft, where we have more closely explored the correspondence between physical form (receptors and structural protein arrangements) and tangible interfaces, it seems that these shapes may be worth considering more closely now the sensor matrix is working well.

Pattern Matrix at Algomech (part 1)

I’m writing this on the train with a slightly sleep deprived brain fizzing and popping from thoughts, ideas and conversations from this year’s Algomech festival in Sheffield. The Penelope project took a significant role in the festival, with the group’s participation in the Unmaking Symposium, the exhibition and also testing our latest weavecoding technology at the Algorave. I’ll be writing more on the algorave in a subsequent post.

During the symposium we discussed the critical, liberating and potentially dangerous aspects of Unmaking in a wide variety of contexts – from reverse engineering knitwear and classical Greek dance to discovering the untapped abilities of classical musical instruments when human limitations become a secondary consideration. The symposium also provided us with a good opportunity to take stock of our own group’s current directions and thinking in regard to the Penelope project.

We also had our own corner of the Algomech exhibition, which included Jacquard woven experiments, the Quipu sonification and visualisation and the first public trials of the new pattern matrix V2.

As is our usual practice, we used this exhibition to get essential feedback on our new design for the pattern matrix, as well as the interpretation of what we are doing – being there in person talking to people allows you to very quickly determine what works, and adapt the focus based on the responses you get.

We discussed the long view on digital technology, the role of weavers in foundations of western mathematics and simply the practicalities of the technology we are developing – the constant stream of visitors represented a wide range of different ages and backgrounds. These aspects of the pattern matrix seemed significant (in no particular order):

The construction technique was immediately interesting to most people, specifically the material, beech wood spalting and open frame construction.
Related to this, there seems little association with the pattern matrix as a ‘device’ in the sense of a ‘gizmo’ – which is interesting as the Raspberry Pi and other PCBs are clearly visible. We’ve noticed this at some level with the previous version but with the wood construction this effect is much more pronounced.
It is seen as being game like, e.g. a “70’s educational toy”. There is an expectation that it is something to be ‘played’, and similarly its potential as a musical sequencer is a common observation.
The understandability of the magnet sensing seems a key ingredient. There is no other particularly hidden magic like computer vision or RFID involved, and polarity and digital arrangements of magnets are easily explained and experienced by holding the tokens together.
Having some extra circuit boards and wood cut parts to hand, originally intended as backups – were great for people who wanted to know more about what was going on. In future we should also have the token block parts to show as well.
The different shaped blocks were immediately appealing – they seemed to invite experimentation more than alternating the binary tokens by flipping them. To follow this up we need to investigate ways to use different shapes to configure thread colour at the same time as structure in a better way than we are now. The black/white sides could define structure while the shape could correspond to the colour for the specific thread. It also indicates that using shaped tokens as instructions for tablet weaving is worth experimenting with quite soon.
Younger children focused on the blocks alone (and of course tried all sorts of things no one else did, like stacking them) but slightly older children worked out they were having an effect on the weaving process and generally could patiently work themselves it out without any explanation required.
Having Anni Albers’ ‘On Weaving’ book next to pattern matrix helped with older visitors, perhaps representing a more conventional and authoritative source of information to introduce the concepts of notation, structure and pattern in weaving.

The 8-way tangible colour switching instruction — An 8-way tangible colour switching instruction

Physical vs digital – a false dichotomy

More general concepts that came up in conversation included a common theme during Algomech, exploring the inescapably fuzzy boundaries of concepts such as digital, physical and analogue. The myth of the “real world” being analogue and the “virtual world” being digital is a troublesome one to a weaver.

The ‘anti-device’ effect of the pattern matrix has the potential to explore this conundrum, as it represents a seemingly acceptable demonstration of the physical nature of the digital, and that forms of digital technology have inhabited the world of the reassuringly physical for many millennia of human invention.

Check your supply chains

One aspect of the pattern matrix I picked on for the symposium which came up in the exhibition as well was the fact that the beech wood came from a single tree in Cornwall courtesy of Aaron Moore – and used this as an example of our design philosophy of taking on the myth of collapse rather than the myth of infinite abundance.

Feedback from Penelope team members

Having a 5X5 grid initially was thought to be excessive, as most ancient weaves can be expressed with a 4X4 matrix. This larger capability turns out to be more important than we first thought, as it means you can demonstrate the importance of odd and even numbers in the mathematics of weaving.

There is a problem with the single colour change block due to a faulty use of the code from the old version. This has always been a somewhat temporary feature so we should sort this out properly (e.g. using other shapes for colour across the matrix) before we use it next.

We can also try using an augmented reality approach to show the weave structure directly over the grid, so it’s easier to see how the token block changes relate to specific crossings. This could be displayed alongside the current warp weighted loom rather than as a replacement for it.

PCB design for pattern matrix 2

This is the pattern matrix 2 tangible sensor schematic, which is fairly simple – just 4 hall effect sensors and a capacitor to smooth out any noise on the power supply.

We need to make hundreds of these for the Penelope Project, and we can save some costs by using the built in pull up resistors in the MCP32017 to get a decent signal from the sensors. The difficulty with this PCB is arranging the sensors so they align with the magnets in the tangible programming block in the optimum manner. From tests with the prototype Lego rig, this isn’t actually too critical – but it’s set up so the lead length can be tweaked a bit at soldering time.

This took me about 20 variations to finally get right, but the circuit is just about simple enough that it can be made single sided – this is good because the top side will be partly exposed, while the lower side with all the copper traces can be protected. It’s good practice to have large areas of copper left connected to ground, partly as it’s a common connection needed all over the board, partly for stability but also it reduces the amount of chemicals required to etch the circuit – as only the parts around the traces need to be removed.

The i2c expander board is a little more complicated. The design is made to be modular so we can stack up any number of these connected to the Raspberry Pi for different arrangements of sensors. Each board can deal with 8 sensor locations (each comprising 4 individual hall effect sensors). Their job is to convert the digital signals from each sensor into serial data (using the i2c protocol) so the Raspberry Pi can read them all just using 2 wires, plus 2 for power.

Each board can be configured to a separate i2c device address to tell it apart from the others using jumper connectors. This one had to be 2 sided, but I managed it without any ‘vias’ (holes to pass traces from one side of the board to another). I also added a power indicator LED as a last minute addition.

I’ve been learning the open source Kicad software to design these, which is now used by CERN for building the LHC, so it’s pretty fully featured! The idea is that you draw the schematic first, link each component with a physical ‘footprint’, then switch to the PCB design stage. Other software I’ve used in the past tries to route everything in one go for you (and can come up with some pretty strange and messy results). Kicad works in a semi-automatic manner – you need to draw each trace by hand, but it routes them around components and other traces, and suggests the shortest path for you. This is quite a lot better than a fully automatic approach as you have more control over the end result, and easily end up with a decent placement of all the parts.

This project is of course open hardware, and can be found on github here.

Pattern Matrix 2 haptic experiments

One of the potential future additions to our tangible programming hardware is haptic feedback, using sound/vibration to provide a extra channel of information through your fingers when programming with tangible blocks. We wanted to test this before designing the PCB hardware in case we could add it to the system simply – this was initiated by watching a reverse engineering video on youtube (I think by bigclivedotcom) where a technique was mentioned for sneakily reusing input lines (of which we have hundreds) as outputs when they are not being read, by using diodes to separate the signals.

Piezo transducers are often used as cheap speakers, and they can also provide some touch feedback by using lower frequencies. We tested one to see if it interfered with the magnetic fields, and the diaphragm doesn’t seem to be ferrous metal (I’m not actually sure what it is made from) so it can be placed right over the sensors with no effect. A bit more Lego to attach it to the prototype sensor unit, and to see we can feel it through the tangible block when it’s touching the sensor.

The first attempt consisted of simply plugging a speaker into the i/o line from the MCP23017 port expander, switching between input and output on the Pi and adding a diode to prevent the output voltage getting to the sensor.

The problem is all the circuits we’re using run on 3.3V, but the piezo speaker I’m using is rated up to 20V – so it’s just not strong enough to feel it. The Pi also provides 5V pins, so a second attempt to use a simple driver circuit (single transistor common emitter amplifier) to boost the voltage:

You can hear this version in the video above – it’s playing a sound using a frequency crudely determined by the 4 bit value the block orientation represents whenever it changes. This is louder (loud enough at least to make a recording) but still not enough to feel easily, even when you put the piezo between the sensor and the block. So it seems the best way to get this to work properly will be via a separate circuit, not something we can slot into the existing input hardware. Another advantage of doing it separately is that we can treat it more like a multichannel audio setup with a dedicated processor that is not interrupted by the sensor reading. One solution I saw was to use the same H bridges as used to drive motors from microcontrollers as these take much higher voltages – this will be something to try later on.

New pattern matrix developments

A few weeks ago we kicked off the new Penelope project, and while in Munich one of our first jobs was to deliver the prototype pattern matrix to the Museum of Casts of Classical sculpture for exhibition over the summer as part of our Penelopean lab. Our next mission in Cornwall is to design new tangible programming hardware so we can start manufacturing a small run of alternative versions with more sensors to try new experiments with them. Some of them will be used for public exhibition, others for the researchers to use in talks and seminars, others for musical livecoding performances.

A big focus for us is the materials and physical design, on the one hand like everything FoAM Kernow builds it needs to be open source and appropriate technology (so easily explainable and built by others) and on the other it needs to be sympathetic to it’s context in the museum, displayed alongside looms and technology that are thousands of years old. This has resonance with the Al Jazari livecoding installation in the Alhambra in 2008, where a juxtaposition of modern and ancient curiously worked. As part of this we want to switch from materials like aluminium and plastic to wood construction – employing similar building techniques to the looms themselves, but more along the lines of inspiration to inform alternative technological choices rather than simple mimicry.

We’re also trying out simpler electronics designs – firstly switching to slightly cheaper hall effect sensors (SS411P from SS411A, previously) and testing different kinds of magnets – which turns out to be the more tricky part to get right. Here is a rare earth magnet test:

Ferrite magnet test:

For environmental and cost reasons ferrite magnets would be much better to use, and they are strong enough to be picked up by the sensors in a useful range – however presumably in order to increase their ‘stickiness’ it appears that ferrite magnets are often magnetised in complex ways, with both poles being present on the same (active) side, and much reduced on the other. This means we can’t use them in the same way, they flip the field on and off with the same orientation and don’t do anything on the other. We’re still searching for a fix for this, but currently the best we can do is reduce the rare earth magnet thickness to 1.5 mm from 3mm used in the prototype.

The prototype was useful for demonstrating that we can use digital signals rather than needing analogue sensors which it was built to allow if the hall effect sensors were not good enough – so a big development is removing the microcontrollers we needed before and replacing them with port expander ICs (MCP23017). These even use the same serial communication we were using (i2c) to talk to the Raspberry Pi so it’s a straight swap.

In order to test the new system all together as well as new magnet combinations and spacing we built a prototype with lego to hold the sensors in the right position, and provide the base for the tangible programming block to rest or be rotated on. This is important to do for the design of the PCB before it goes for production – as we can’t change the sensor position afterwards, more on that part soon.

Picademy Exeter and Future Thinking for Social Living

Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and electronics to the point where they can start designing their own teaching materials on the second day of the two day course. This is a model I’m intending to use for the second inset teacher training day I’m doing next week at Truro school – it’s pretty exciting to see the ideas that they have for activities for their pupils, and a good challenge to help find ways to bring them into existence in a day.

We also had the ending of Future Thinking for Social Living at the Miners Court summer party last week. We exhibited the map made during the workshops, made lots of tea, and had some fun with the pattern matrix in musical mode out in the garden – I adapted Alex’s music system we used with Ellen in Munich to run on Raspberry Pi so it didn’t require a laptop, or a screen at all – simply a speaker. It was interesting how quickly people got the idea, in many ways music is easier to explain than weaving as listening while coding is multi-sensory.

Weavecoding Munich

Ellen’s exhibition in Munich was always going to be a pivotal event in the weavecoding project – one of the first opportunities to expose our work to a large audience. The Museum of casts of classical sculptures was the perfect context for the mythical aspects of weaving, overlooked by Penelope and friends with her subversive woven/unwoven work, we could explore the connections between livecoding and weaving.

Practically we focused on developing the tangible weavecoding exhibit for events later in the week, as well as discussing the many languages we have developed so far for different looms and weaving techniques. One of our discoveries is that none of the models or languages we have created seem sufficient in themselves – weaving could be far too big to be able to be described or solved from a single perspective. We’ve tried approaches describing weave structures from the actions of the weaver, setup of the loom and structure of the fabric – perhaps the most promising is to explor the story of weaving from the perspective of the thread itself.

One of the distinctive things about weaving in antiquity is how multiple technologies were combined to form a single piece of fabric, weaving in different directions, weft becoming warp, use of tablets vs warp weighted weaving. To explain this via the path of a single conceptual thread crossing through itself may make this possible to describe in a more flexible, declarative and abstracted manner than having to explain each method separately as if in it’s own world.

The pattern matrix has now been made into good shape for explaining the relationship between colour and structure in pattern formation. For the first time we also used all 4 sensors per block on the bottom row which meant we could use a special “colour” block that the system recognises from the normal warp/weft ones and use it’s rotation to choose between 8 preset colour settings. This was quite a breakthrough as it had all been theoretical before.

Adding this more complex use of the magnetic patterns meant that Alex could set up the matrix as a tangible interface for his tidal livecoding software meaning Ellen could join us for a collaborative slub weavecoding performance on the Saturday evening. The prospect of performing together was something we have talked about since the very beginning of the project, so it was great to finally reach this point. The reverb in the museum was vast, meaning that we had to play the space a lot, and provide ‘music for looking at sculptures by’:

Tangible programming: detecting flip, rotation and id with magnets

When we started designing the pattern matrix we wanted to include the possibility of encoding more than binary (which side is up) using the magnets. In order to test this, we made the bottom row of sensors with 4 in a square – the rest only have one sensor currently (to avoid blowing the budget on hall effect sensors).

Here are some test blocks with four magnets glued on. The one at the back is easy to make as they naturally snap together edge to edge in this pattern, the closer one required superglue and lots of patience – I’m still expecting it to fire a magnet off unexpectedly at some point:

The orientation seems to work well in our tests so far, as you rotate the blocks the sensors latch from one state to the other – and it seems like they stick to their previous reading until the block is very nearly aligned straight. I’ve added some sound on the Pi to give some haptic feedback which is turning out to be very useful.

The next job was to head back to makernow make some better blocks with the magnets inside. Oliver Hatfield milled out new holes in some of our spares:

Luckily the fit is really tight so with some force the magnets can be placed inside without the need for any gluing – and they don’t rattle around at all:

The next thing was to make some visual indication of the polarity and meaning of the patterns, and show how the binary encoding changes with flipping and rotating. Andy Smith designed and laser engraved these new caps and locating rings:

The 4 bit binary codes read in clockwise order from the top left (same as the notation for tablet weaving) so rotation causes the same effect as bitwise rotate in programming – multiply/divide by 2 with overflow. There are 4 possible different configurations of magnets (which can provide block identification). Two of the configurations are mirrored on both sides but you can read rotation still, with the other two you also can tell which side is up, and one – bottom left in the photo below, can represent 8 states all by itself (flip as well as rotate).

In future we’ll make more of these with specific meanings dependant on the language we use them for and what they actually do – at this point they are for debugging/experimenting further.

Pattern matrix – putting it together

Here is a member of staff at Miners Court trying some tangible weave coding in the midst of our crafts area – at the moment it’s simply displaying the weave structure on the simulated warp weighed loom with a single colour each for warp and weft threads, the next thing is to get ‘colour & weave’ patterns working.

The pattern matrix is the second generation of tangible programming device from the weavecoding project. It’s been built as an open hardware project in collaboration with Falmouth University’s Makernow fablab, who have designed and built the chassis using many 3D printed parts and assembled the electronics using surface mount components (far beyond my stripboard skills).

Here you can see the aluminium framework supporting the AVR based row controller boards with the Raspberry Pi in the corner. The hall effect sensors detect magnetic fields – this picture was taken before any of the wiring was started.

The row controllers are designed to read the sensor data and dispatch it to the Raspberry Pi using i2c serial communication running on their atmega328 processors. This design was arrived at after the experience of building flotsam which centralised all of the logic in the Raspberry Pi, resulting in lots of wiring required to collect the 128 bits of information and pass it to the GPIO port on the Pi. Using i2c has the advantage that you only need two wires to communicate everything, processing can be distributed and it can be far more modular and extendible in future. In fact we plan to try different sensors and configurations – so this is a great platform for experimenting with tangible programming.

This video shows the current operation of the sensors and row controllers, I’ve programmed the board with test code that displays the state of the magnetic field with the status LED, making sure that it can tell the orientation of the programming block:

The row controllers have a set of multiplexers that allow you to choose between 20 sensor inputs all routed to an analogue pin on the AVR. We’re just using digital here, but it means we can try totally different combinations of sensors without changing the rest of the hardware.

After getting the first couple of rows working and testing it with elderly people at our Miners Court residency there were a couple of issues. Firstly the magnets were really strong, and I worried about leaving it unattended with the programming blocks snapping together so violently (as we plan to use it in museum settings as well as at Miners Court). The other problem was that even with strong magnets, the placement of the blocks needed to be very precise. This is probably to do with the shape of the magnets, and the fact that the fields bend around them and reverse quite short distances from their edges.

To fix these bugs it was a fairly simple matter to take the blocks apart, remove 2 of the 3 magnets and add some rings to guide placement over the sensors properly: