From lab.sensorial at gmail.com Sat Mar 20 14:07:24 2010 From: lab.sensorial at gmail.com (Sensor Lab) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:07:24 -0400 Subject: [CART360] Augmented Mindfulness. Message-ID: <92939A1F-A594-4791-9175-C00B8A5DAF07@gmail.com> *Augmented Mindfulness is a term coined by frog Principal Designer Josh Musick, defining a growing field of user experience design that applies to methods of recording behavior, processing the data collected, and feeding it back to the individual or group so that they can better understand the patterns of their activity; and, ostensibly, adapt their behavior more intelligently than they would without these augmentations. http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/designing-for-awareness-at-sxswi.html? From skiptracer at gmail.com Wed Mar 31 17:17:23 2010 From: skiptracer at gmail.com (Morgan Sutherland) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:17:23 -0400 Subject: [CART360] PSoC (and Teensy) is Awesome Message-ID: I've just finished taking a good look at Cypress PSoC (Programmable System on a Chip)[1][2] after a reference from Vincent L. and Avrum Hollinger (who is using them in a fiber-optic+silicone based musical interface/instrument at McGill). [More on that: Avrum and Joe Thibodeau are working on a modular embedded framework for designing electronic music instruments. I'm not sure if they'll come up with something useable...] PSoC is kind of like Max/MSP for embedded systems[3]. You buy a chip (about the size of the AVR in an Arduino) and using a programmer and a visual block-diagram style IDE, you can reconfigure various digital and analog blocks in the chip. Digital blocks are like: timers, communication protocols. Analog blocks are like: filters, programmable amplifiers, ADC's. PSoC is great (in theory) for new media projects because you can quickly develop, for instance, all the outboard signal processing you need on one chip without having to buy new parts and write microcontroller code. I'm looking at the following signal chain for my current project (a sensor glove): sensors => voltage divider => PSoC(amplifier => lowpass filter) => (Xbee?) => Teensy(ADC => micro-OSC code[4] => USB) => Max/MSP/Jitter I'll be ordering a programmer kit[5] as soon as my academic credentials are cleared ($38). For now I'm looking at the PSoC 1 series. PSoC 3 is just a bit more powerful (still 8 bit) while PSoC 5 has an onboard 32-bit ARM Cortex. I don't need that kind of digital power. Also, the PSoC 1 chips have more available analog blocks (around 12) while the PSoC 3 and 5 have at most 4 (presumably because you can do all your fancy filtering in the digital domain). Here's a link to the book Designer's Guide to the Cypress PSoC in PDF: http://msutherl.net/files/ashby_psoc.zip Tangent: I'm also psyched about a new Teensy coming in the mail: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ After pouring over the available kits, Teensy proves to be the most promising board for getting lots of data into a computer (Max) at high rez. The most important thing is that it has native USB (built into the AVR chip), giving you much better USB throughput. It also has 12 8-bit analog inputs and runs at 16mhz. While these are not surprising specs, as Adrian Freed (co-creator of OSC) has argued, there is so much noise jitter between the ADC and your computer with the currently available gear (and amateur analog skillz) that you wouldn't be able to take advantage of better (10-12 bit) ADCs anyway. Adrian has micro-OSC code for the Teensy posted at the CNMAT website (not sure if it has time-tagging). Oh, and finally, you can run Arduino sketches on it with Teensyduino. Cheers, Morgan [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSoC [2] http://www.cypress.com/?id=1353 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Psoc_blocks.PNG [4] http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/research/uosc [5] http://www.nkcelectronics.com/cy3210-miniprog1-pso32101.html