Frank Chimero - States

Pretty awesome set of prints by Frank Chimero, taking the basic shape of states, and turning them into seemingly unrelated illustrations. It's especially interesting when you consider that the shape of states themselves are a combination of man made and naturally occurring boarders.

[via swissmiss]

Little blog recode.

I just altered that reads the blog on AndrewParnell.com

I'd noticed that the default feed from blogger (which powers this blog) only shows the 25 most recent entries, which really isn't good enough for me.

However, after some searching I found that if you append the query string ?start-index=# to the feed path, you can get older entries. Better yet, throw on &max-results=5 and rather than having to parse the entire feed and then have php display only 5 entries, I can just show the entire feed.

It's pretty sweet.

Oh, and because that picture I posted earlier really didn't cut it:

Here's a video of the tri-duino in action.

Tri-duino from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.

Wood

Bought a new table saw and put that bad boy to use.


Time is running down.

Tri-duino

The last little bit of science for my upcoming project:

The Tri-duino!

Just a little proof of concept based on the dual core arduino

This one is 3 arduino chips sharing a power supply and a 16mhz crystal to keep in perfect sync. The final project is going to be running 16 of these.

Chuck Returns

Season 2 of Chuck airs a week from today, but Hulu has it now.

I've got mixed feelings about early online premiers...but of course, I watched it.

Without spoiling any of the actual episode for you, let me share with you, in 3 frames, my favorite gag in the episode.



Oh cereal.

Google Knows:

Yes, Google knows many things, but does it know how to love?

[via swissmiss]

Ryan Day!

I don't know if you read any webcomics. I do. ...quite a few. My bookmarks have 132 (that number is down quite a bit from a year ago) plus a few that show up in my livejournal friends feed.

My "I read a lot of comics and am generally a giant nerd" creds aside, Ryan Estrada, aka Mr Awesome apparently has 100 70 guest comics out there today.

One Hundred Seventy

Same as the number of pennies in a dollar seventy cents.
Or dollars in a hundred seventy dollars.
Or tens in a grand seven hundred...ok, I've gone to far with this bit wow it's an even worse bit now.

Anyway, so far I've found... 30ish (haven't been counting) 21 (I counted) but I know there are many more out there. I'm looking! You should too!

Why.

So, thanks to mem on the arduino forum, I managed to figure out the damage to the code:

Now it works!

Fixed! from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.

What was wrong?
Short version: I was being really wasteful.

Long version: the way the code was written, each LED took a whole byte to assign. With the fixed code, each row takes a byte. (Taking it from 64 bytes per pattern, to 8. Serious savings!)

Code in the comments.

Why!!!!

Ok, this is my personal project update/post for the evening. (Also explains why I'm up at 4 am.)

I've found that adding 15 or more "characters" for the code to go through, totally breaks the matrix. 14 or less, fine. 15 or more, mess. Also 15 screws it up differently than 16+ (15 just freezes the loop, 16+ start creating garbage) What's weird is that there is nothing changed in the code except the length of the array, and the adding of a few more array entries. So I can't figure out why it's breaking like this.

Wanna see what I'm talking about? Sure.

Good

Working from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.

Bad/Broken

Broken from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.


And if you care, like last time, code is in the comments.

Also great:

Are these tables by Formtank made from a single sheet of metal:



I've been staring at them for a few hours now, and I think I finally figured out how they're cut. The seem on the supports is near invisible! (At least on the online photos anyway)

[via unplggd]

This is a neat project from Evil Mad Scientist

...dear lord, did I just refer to something as neat. Yes, yes I did.

Alright, moving on then:


Came across this project while at work today (I get bored easily and sometimes distract myself with awesome blogs...but I didn't admit to that.) Basically it's a quick and simple yard light, made of LEDs, batteries, and canning jars. Quick, cheap, simple, and totally repurposable.

AWESOME!

[via Evil Mad Scientist]

Wired Panel

I went out and bought more gator clips and wrote up some code so I can give my cork board led panel a test drive.

AND IT WORKS!



8x8 Red LED Matrix driven by Arduino. from Andrew Parnell on Vimeo.

For those of you interested in the code, see the comments section.

I'm sick of YouTube...

Well, more accurately I'm sick of YouTube's horrid quality on videos, so I went to Vimeo to finally sign up for an account over there.

While signing up I came across this (they had it right on the front page):



Lip Dub - Tambureddu HD from Leonardo Dalessandri on Vimeo.


Great for a giggle.

Since I'm talking about music videos anyway...

I might as well share the one I've watched atleast daily since my internet got hooked up at the house:


Admittedly, part of my love for this video comes from the mass amount of naked (albeit censored) people running about in it, but that aside it's an incredibly clever idea. Also, the little details: such as the singing along at 0:44 and the fact that the shirts with prints on them correlate to the various artists in this collab (David Byrne on the yellow shirt, Dizzee Rascal on the red, and BPA on the brown) make this video just amazing.

Higher quality available on Keith Schofield (the director)'s site: [here] (Highly recommend watching the high quality version)

Ima Robot

So, I don't know when, where, or how, but apparently at some point I downloaded Ima Robot's "Creeps Me Out" and it recently started coming up regularly on my ipod (I listen to music very passively. Just set the entire library to random)

The song itself is fairly catchy, but what I really love is the music video by Frank Borin. Giant game of musical chairs for the win!



If the low quality of the youtube video drives you nuts (like it does me) Frank Borin has a quicktime version of it on his site: [here]

Mr. Wurfel

Is Wurfel some language (I've eliminated Dutch and German) for "Waffle" or does it just sound like my Opa (dutch grandfather) saying waffle. I've got to believe that's intentional.

[Via swissmiss]

Free Geek

So, I just moved to Portland... 2 weeks ago.

Sadly, aside from going to work, I haven't left the house all that much.

But while Googling for a place locally that might sell atmega chips (I may need about 16 arduinos in the near future) I found out about this place: Free Geek. It sounds really cool. I'm going tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes.

Cork Board as Protoboard

I'm prepping to do a 1024 LED sculpture, and the suggestion came up of scaling it from 2' x 2' to 4' x 4'. I was concerned that this new size without an equivalent increase in LEDs (which I really am not prepared to do) so I built a sample square foot panel to try the spacing. Of course, I don't have a square foot protoboard (does anyone?) so instead I built it on a piece of cork board. What I really liked about this method was that it allowed me to prototype it as a 2 layer board.





The larger scale actually works a lot better than I anticipated.