Natebu is on display again! For the TISSOT stand at the Baselworld we covered a entire welcome desk of 5 square meters.
Photos will follow soon. In the meanwhile you can go to Basel and see it yourself.
The exhibition is open till Thursday the 10th of April.
This weekend (Fr./Sa. 7./8. December) we are at the diy* festival 07 in Zürich. http://www.diyfestival.ch
Besides workshops, lectures and concerts the festival also features an exposition where we show Natebu. Feel free to visit us there.
I finally managed to upload a new movie about the data visualisation. One of the Natebu boards is connected to a mac that is running a Processing sketch. This bar chart was just for debugging. The door is now open to all kind of Processing applications.
At the moment there is the Ars Electonica Festival in Linz Austria and we are very proud to be able to show our project at the Campus 2.0.
You can find us at the Kunstuniversität Linz on the second floor.
We just uploaded a new Video to YouTube:
We have some more pictures of ways to use natebu in public:
Until now we used to power the matrix over the USB ports of three computers. This was no satisfying solution at all. We now connected an old computer power supply which has a 5 V DC output. This does the job just fine.
We also did some work on the code. We now have a mode to display text and abstract animations.
We finally can show you some arduino source-code of our project.
It is quite a mess and really rough but it seems to work.
We are working on a more sophisticated version so stay tuned.
Code after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
After three days and nights working we finaly finished our project. We turned over a functional matrix prototype, a high end mock-up and flash animations to explain the interaction. Enjoy the pix as we do.
More pictures after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
We are getting awfully close to the finishing line…
It took a while to get the idea but these too MDF pieces saved the day.
Bending over 1’000 resistors by hand would have been a real pain…
Today we assembled the first pcd matrix board. It took about 4 hours but doesn’t it look great? To our surprise it also works great. We are quiet relieved to see that the calculations and the planing war right. We will upload a video as soon as possible.
Probably the worst photoshop montage ever 😉
Dude to the complexity of our pcb layout we where looking for some help. Iftest a company for Innovative Industrial and Medical Electronics offered us some support and today we received the so called “gerber daten” for the boards. We are already looking forward to get out our soldering irons 😉board_layout
We never realy told you what we want to do with our creation. In fact we never realy knew it. But now we do! After houres of discutions and hard work we decided to create a interactive sculpture for the public space. It is our wish to bring peoples together, give them the chance to be active and communicative and bring life and relaxation to urban spaces. Led matrixes are already awhile a part of many public spaces but they are just used to tell use waht we should wear or drink. With our matrix you have the chance to get in a dialog with it and expres your self. The monolith and the arc are the ones we wont to work out.
More picures after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Because mind and body should be in harmony we started to search a suitable physical form for our creation.
The first board layout is ready for review.
You can donwload the pdf here: layout_pcb
This is a short video demonstration of how our matrix prototype works:
Today we set up a new test installation. We used a video projector, a rear projection screen and the infrared webcam to simulate a large scale interactive led matrix. It only took some lines of processing code and about 1200 small reflective strickers.
Thanks to all the fellow student who helped with a cople of stickers 😉
This picture is a screenshot from processing:
This is our attempt to draw a circuit diagram of the LED units.
We are not quite sure if it is a good solution, but is works one the prototype.
After sorting out some soldering mistakes and after debugging our Arduino code the prototype finally works.
One smaller problem we still have, is that the Arduino can’t give us as much power as we would need. But this can be solved easaly with an additional power supply.
For the moment the capacity of the matrix is still kind of limited. All it can to is light up LEDs whenever the infrared transistors get enough light. Any object that gets close enough to a transistor will trigger the accordant LED.
With some more programming we will be able to do much more.
Over the past weeks we had many diffrent ideas of how an interactive LED- Matrix could work. To free our minds we illustrated them all colorful.
This one is the technique we want to realize with a prototyp.
More concepts after the jump.
Just some catchwords about the project.
We are still searching for the look of the final installation.
Some pictures of our first interactive matrix prototype.
Our prototype consists of a matrix of 64 dots.
Each pot has one LED for the output and one infrared fototransistor with an infrared LED as input. To control all this we use the Arduino beard.
Fot this first prototype we decidet to use wires instead of the conductive ink.
It turned out to be a lot of soldering work…
More pictures abter the jump.
This was an idea of combinig the FTIR thing with some IR-Transistors:
After our tests we started to think how can we create something wich is not only fun for us. So we tried to find scenarios with a value for other peoples. For that we used the good old method to writte everytihng in your brain on a Post-it and stick it to a wall. Sorry und jetzt muess i uf e Zug. Mach morn fertig…
Here you can find a digital version of the brainstorming:
You may already know Jeff Han and his multi touch finger tracking, if you don’t go here: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/. With a small acrylic pane, some IR LEDs a video projector and a webcam that we modified to see IR light we built our own little multi touch display. It actually works really well.
This is a picture from the IR webcam. The bright spots is where the fingers touch the acrylic pane.
After the burdensome trip to Mr. Mathis lab we could start to bulid our first PCB. Draw some conducting paths on a self-adhesive foil and cut them out. Put the stencil on a nonconducting surface and spray it with Mr. Mathis paint. Remove the stencil carfuly and add some LED’s to it to make sure that it works. More pictures after the jump.
Today we went for a trip to Luzern. After a short stop at the Museum of Art and a lake-side picnic we had a meeting with Roger Mathis from http://www.sansecura.ch/ a company for electromagnetic field shielding. With a lot of useful information and a bucket full of a highly conductive paint we took the train back home. You may see in rob’s face that we cant wait to test it ;- )
We spent the week doing some research. We were searching for all kind of projects in art, design, architecture, programming and technology and we found a lot.
We bookmarked most of the things we found on our 
del.icio.us page.
We are proude to present you the first step on the long road to our diploma. The timetable! A very useful tool to get your final degree. We are the world’s first transdisciplinary team who trys to addresse the relationships between a art project and a timetable.
So, here we are!
Natebu is a documentary blog of the diploma project of André Huber and Roland Broennimann.
We are students at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland www.fhnw.ch Academy of Art and Design. André in Industrial Design and Roland in Media Arts.
On this blog you can follow our Project for the next couple of months.
natebu 