Intro to Physical Computing

Todd's homepage - www.toddholoubek.com/pcomp/
Forget about the mouse and keyboard and embrace the world of a sensing computer. We explore the possibilities of using physical connections based around the PIC 18F452 chip to enhance the human experience of technology.
Todd Holoubek is the professor of our class, he is definitely the most entertaining professor I have ever had. He has the ability to make a subject which could be dry and technically overwhelming into an engaging and laugh-filled experience. If anyone remembers the old MTV sketch comedy show 'The State', well he was the writer of that show, he had his beginnings in showbiz and acting.

Currently I'm most interested in studying motion tracking, realtime video manipulation, sensing/reactive tactile surfaces, and data visualization. I'm interested in physical computing in designing a more powerful interface/ controller to aid in the expression of my work.

Observation Project Proposal - Tracking people on a floor using wifi signals and RFID tags. This presentation could have probably been a bit better, but I think the idea has merit.

Midterm Prototype - Reactive Lighting
The original plan was to have an entire room with reactive lighting based on peoples movement within that space. However, in typical Pcomp fashion we realized our idea was far too difficult to pull off in a week and we were forced to scale it down to the area of a tabletop. The main issue here was getting the shift register IC to work or as we like to mistakenly call them - 'Bit Shifters'. These are tricky to understand at first, professor Dano Sullivan describes them as a bucket brigade that takes your serial data and converts it into binary. It then passes the binary outputs to the desired load. The main trick is that the entire array needs to be filled, whether you are using the remaining bits or not.
We created a system that tracks movement in a specified area using a webcam. It's uasing a video sensing technique called 'background subtraction', which essentailly takes a screen capture of a set location and registers any change within that area to trigger some other event. The original Processing code was taken from Golan Levin's great webpage - www.flong.com - and then modified to our liking. I pasted it below for everyone's viewing pleasure. This project helped us understand some of the dynamics of using a videocamera as a sensor and enabled us to trigger simple LEDs to turn on.


Final - Segment Tags
Check out our final project blog - Segment Tags
This project has taken on several different iterations and is finally shaping into a tangible piece of work. Our initial concept was to create a massive 10x10 grid of seven-segment displays (those are the little number displays, you know like in your alarm clock). We realized that getting these little fuckers to work was a lot more than we expected. Just to get one number up takes at least 9 wires and a bunch of trial an error to figure out which pin to hi or lo to get what you want.

These are the homepages of my 2 Pcomp partners in crime -
Jenny Chowdery's Homepage
Michael DelGaudio's Homepage

VJ N9ne
This was my ICM final. I aided in the creation of a custom mixer in the form of a glove. We felt this freed up the VJ to perform much more freely. The idea initially started as a custom VJ mixer pad.