A journey through information technologies
The context It’s been a long time since my last post and since it’s always difficult to get back at it I will start the year with an easy tutorial. I’m working on a design in which we have incorporated a big illuminated green push-button, the kind that you see on arcade machines. It is…
This project was born from a very common problem: our office’s floor is equipped with one bathroom that can’t be seen from every desk. Ensues unnecessary back and forth when someone walks to the bathroom only to find it occupied. The solution ? A simple bathroom monitoring system composed of two devices: An emitter placed…
Truth be told, the first Hackathon I assisted to happened only a month ago in Montreal. It was my fist contact with such an event, and a great experience overall. It’s not often that you find yourself surround with 400 people that share a common interest about technologies and hacking as in making things work…
The L3DCube The cube falls into the category of volumetric displays, meaning that it can be used to represent 3 dimensional shapes. It is composed of 8*8*8 512 RGB LEDs, namely the very popular WS2812 that you can find in Adafruit’s neopixel product line. It is sold by a company called Looking glass factory. It…
Overview Basically a demonstration of the plotting capabilities of the cube. We will retrieve some data from a public thingspeak channel (they correspond to data points posted by a connected barometer installed in my living room). The JSON returned by the Thingspeak API is parsed on processing and displayed on the cube. Each serie of…
Overview We will make use of the OpenWeatherMap API to retrieve the temperature from cities around the world and displays the result on the cube. The result is a “real-time” (actually the free API key only gives access to hourly updates) visualization of the earth’s weather. A Python script is used to select which cities…
Overview The video stream’s frames are divided into 8×8 squares of equal surface. The average RGB values of every pixel in the square is extracted and used to recompose a smaller image. The image is then projected on to the cube. With enable3d option set to true, the past 7 frames are stored and displayed…
Overview The Kinect is a traditional camera doubled with an Infra Red Camera, enabling it to perceive depth in addition to the color information. Originally sold for Xbox, it is now available for PCs under the brand Kinect for Windows. Don’t let the name fool you, it will work just as well on OSX or…
Prologue A while ago I worked on a project that I called “The anti procrastination box“. The idea was to have a box inside which you could lock down your sources of distraction for a predefined amount of time (weather it be your favorite video game cd, your cellphone…). Shortly after I had published a…
Prologue I recently got involved with an organization called Wearhacks. WearHacks is an international non-profit organization headquartered in Montreal, focused on the promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship in Wearable Technology and Internet of Things all over the world. They asked me to make a fun and seasonal project intended to be used at the Los…