Installing the latest PureData on a Raspberry Pi After a fair bit of deliberation I was able to install Pure Data 0.49 on the Pi running Raspbian Stretch. I’ll walk through this step by step in case you’re not familiar with command line in Linux. The default way to install PureData (Pd) is: The only problem with this method of installing Pd is... More
Sensors into OSC with Python How do we move from analogue to digital? There seems to be quite a number of ways including 2D & 3D scanning, photography, and sensors. For the purposes of intentionally limiting our options we’re going to create a physical interface with potentiometers and buttons. We’ll be using the LOP board with a Raspberry Pi. Once... More
Talking about Mineblock at HIDC 2014 This week I had the honour to speak at HOW’s Interactive Design Conference 2014 in Chicago. It was great to have the opportunity to talk about how to design and experiment with the merging of hardware and software. I used the term Meta Products to describe the specific mashup of the physical object with sensors... More
Mineblock Product Design Design Process To me, the MINEBLOCK project represents an excellent example of the convergence of a vast number of technical, digital, physical and human constraints. Knowing that being able to keep a close eye on all of these considerations simultaneously was going to be next to impossible, I asked a few friends to help with... More
Connecting directly to RPi One of the first things you do with a Raspberry Pi is connect it to a wifi or ethernet network but what if you don’t have an extra keyboard or screen available, but you have a laptop? There are times when a HDMI monitor is not available to use with your Raspberry Pi. In those circumstances it can... More
Mineblock Wifi Configuration Userflows Possible user flows for Wifi Configuration Userflow V1 if Mineblock can’t connect to a wifi network Mineblock creates a point-to-point network User uses laptop or phone to connect to network User goes to webpage on their device. (You should be redirected to a config page) User enters the network details (network name and password) User... More
Wifi my Pi Over the week I’m working on two current areas of practical research for Mineblock. The first has to do with one of the biggest gotchas of working with networked devices, particularly ones with no screen: getting it on the network and talking to it. The second is about installation and interaction: choosing the level of flexibility. This... More
SOLID Notes Last week O’Reilly Media hosted the Solid Conference in San Francisco I thought I’d post a quick summary of the high level themes that I heard talked about. I know what you’re thinking, another conference where speakers spit out buzzwords like 3D printing, internet of things, drones, crowd-funding, and so on but I was utterly... More
Creating RaspberryPi Disk Images This is the first of a series of articles about RaspberryPi, I’ll start with a few introductory tutorials to get you up and running. The first thing you’ll want to do once you have a Raspberry Pi is set it up with an operating system. If you’re wondering about the best place to buy a... More
Role Playing at an Intersection Today I wanted to reflect on my role in the team on the Recon Jet Project. This project is another chance for me to experiment with the intersection between design and development disciplines. As many of us have learned, there are many ways to communicate our intentions and proposed solutions in digital media. One of... More