Category: Video Production

IoT Muscle Sensing ‘Sup Brows with Kate Hartman

We spend a lot of time trying to send messages to each other through talking, texting, emailing, and more. What if you could send a message to your friend by simply raising your eyebrows?

This project is a collaboration with Kate Hartman.

In this wearable electronics project, we’ll learn to make muscles send text messages! This learning guide will show you how to use a MyoWare muscle sensor and a Bluefruit Feather microcontroller to transmit a signal through the phone to Adafruit IO and If This Then That to trigger an SMS. Let’s get started!

For this project you will need:

Before you begin, please review and understand the following prerequisite guides:

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Flora + Fona SMSsenger Bag

Scroll text messages on your bag, jacket, or any other surface, using a Flex NeoPixel Matrix and Flora + Fona! Combining these two powerful boards can create the wearables projects of your dreams! This guide starts by covering the particulars of hooking Fona up to Flora including wiring and code modifications, so you can take most any Fona project and build it with Flora.

Before you begin, make sure to familiarize yourself with the following prerequisite guides:

Supplies

To build this project, you will need the following parts and tools:

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How To Make an Android Smart Home Mirror

Make a mirror that’s also a display! Use any Android device and some two-way mirror plastic to whip up a smart home mirror, using Hannah Mitt’s code on Github! This guide will walk you through my process of installing Hannah’s app on my Nexus 7 tablet and installing it at home. First up be sure to read this page and download the code:

HomeMirror by HannahMitt on Github

The app has modules for date, weather, chore reminders, stock prices, XKCD comic updates, news headlines, and more. I find the temperature display particularly useful for deciding which jacket to grab on the way out the door.

I had never done any Android development before (though I did make my phone unlockable with an NFC ring), so I think it’s safe to call this project beginner-friendly. It took a little tinkering to get it working and then some crafting to assemble the mirror, but was very satisfying at each incremental step.

Besides your Android device and its power supply (and a long USB cable), for this project you will need:

  • two-way mirror plastic (see-through) – I got mine at Canal Plastics but you can also get it online
  • double-stick tape
  • velcro tape
  • black construction paper (or dark file folder)
  • packing tape
  • velcro tape
  • scissors
  • power run to your mirror’s desired location
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Mystical LED Halloween Hood

Create glowing eyes for your costume! This project is ideal for any character with glowing eyes, like the Black Mage from Final Fantasy, Jawa from Star Wars, or Orko from He-Man. Two NeoPixel Jewels can appear any color or animating pattern, and they are driven by a GEMMA microcontroller powered by a 500mAh lipoly battery in a 3D printed pocket.

Before you begin, check out these prerequisite guides:

For this project, you will need:

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Roll-up Video Light

Using DotStar LED strips we can create a flexible, portable light source for video and photography. It can squish into small spaces, easily hang up on location, and it’s fun and simple to make.

Different lighting situations call for a different color temperature of light, so we’ll combine warm and cool white LED strips and program a Pro Trinket to adjust the light with a four-button membrane keypad.

We saw a crowdfunding campaign a while back for something similar, and when it was canceled we still wanted one. Now that we have these DotStar LED strips in the shop we can build it together.

Before you begin, read/watch the following guides:

To build this project, you will need:

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F.A.T. GOLD San Francisco

F.A.T. GOLD San Francisco:

Celebrating nearly eight years of pop culture and R&D, the renegade art organization known as the Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is going GOLD. F.A.T. GOLD, that is. From May 21-31, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts will present the acclaimed work of F.A.T. Lab. Curated by Lindsay Howard, the exhibition invites the public to experience and engage with the collective’s groundbreaking projects.

F.A.T. GOLD: San Francisco brings together an international group of thirty collaborators comprised of artists, hackers, engineers, musicians, and graffiti writers. Many of the members will be in San Francisco during the week of May 18, participating in panels, collaborative projects, and leading workshops.

The exhibition will feature significant works from 2007 to the present, including new projects to be launched on opening night. Showcasing a comprehensive and critical selection of the group’s diverse output, the exhibition includes video, software, net art, installation, and performance. F.A.T. Lab members will also be working and hacking on new cutting-edge projects to be added to the exhibition on the fly.

The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. F.A.T. Lab’s greater network of artists, engineers, scientists, and musicians are committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship, and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies, and patents. F.A.T. Lab was co-founded in 2007 by Evan Roth and James Powderly.