Nothing better then some blurry iPhone photo’s to show off new tech. Now people can analyze them to figure out if they are fake of not. Shown in the photos are a prototype board, code named Piranha, for the Zygote interactive ball. It is a really slick board with surface mounted everything. A lot of work has gone into the software controlling the Zygote. It now has ability to be controlled by music, generate music and on board behaviors.

In other news. Chemical Brothers concert (more to follow soon).

Since no one else seems to be building the touchlib binaries anymore I decided maybe I should. I had lots of problems with the build that is on the nuigroup site (I think it mostly had to do with the camera driver) but this new version works great. Use at your own risk and I won’t be providing any support for this build as I just followed a great tutorial to do it.

Touchlib v74

I have been building a multi-touch display for the Digital Design department where I teach. We are approaching the end of the build phase after getting the last vital part. You can follow the progress over at the Digital Design blog.

ActionScript 3 is a lovely step up from AS2 but relearning all your favorite techniques is a bit of a pain. Take for example swapDepths(). What a great little method. Sure it was working the crappy depth system of Flash 8 but it was easy. Let do this in AS3 then. Well for starts its not there because the depths are no longer there. Instead we need to change the index of a displayObject in its displayObjectContainer. Do do this you have to use the new setChildIndex() method of the displayObjectContainer. And to get the item to the top of the list you just set the index to the numChildren-1. Example:
displayObjectContainer.setChildIndex(displayObject, displayObjectContainer.numChildren-1);

Arduino is a great electronics prototyping platform I am currently working with. I have never really talked about it here but I have been teaching another prototyping platform at Digital Design called Teleo. Unfortunately, Teleo is no longer being developed and has transformed into the make controller. I say unfortunately because Teleo was amazingly simple to connect to flash and this made teaching it easy.

But back to Arduino. Arduino seems to be really picking up. It is more complicated to program for as you have to reprogram the ATmega chip at the heart of Arduino to make it do anything. There is some good reference martieral on the Arduino site for those just starting out. I wouldn’t mind switching over to Arduino from Teleo but there are a couple of other things that make this hard. First, is there isn’t a super simple way to connect it to Flash. It needs a serial proxy for this to happen and a great one doesn’t exist yet. Second, is even if there was a proxy a simple API for working with it in Flash doesn’t exist either. These are the two things that Teleo still has that make it so easy to teach. I still think Arduino is a great platform if you don’t need to teach it to a room full of designers.

Soon to come are project photos and sample code.