Potato Piano

Posted on April 12, 2014 by blogmywiki

Inspired by Whack-a-Potato, I decided to make a Potato Piano, using a MaKey MaKey, a laptop and 8 potatoes. This is a pretty simple project: just go to http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/3197340/ and click on the green flag. You don’t even need to install Scratch. Then wire up your 8 potatoes in order to the keys shown on the screen on the MaKey MaKey. And off you go – make a mash-up!

I should warn you that the quality of potato you use is important: you will get a much crisper sound if you use a Jersey Royal than if you use a Sainsbury’s ‘Basics’ potato. Oh, no, hang on, it’s a digital system, it’s on or off – so that’s utter hogwash, like trying saying that it’s worth spending a fortune on a platinum HDMI cable with braid spun from unicorn hair. Or that it matters which direction your speaker cable runs in. Or (for those of you old enough to remember such things) that it makes any difference at all to audio quality which brand of Minidisc you buy.

The only thing that matters is that the spud should contain water. And this is a great way to get your eight a day (it’s bound to be eight by now…)


filmed by Tillster (8)

Posted in Arduino, computers, ICT, music | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Scratch-a-Sketch

Posted on April 11, 2014 by blogmywiki

I love simple paint programs, like my 2005 effort TillyPaint. Scratch is a great environment for coding such things, and I decided to combine a go at writing a new one with Makey Makey pencil-on-paper buttons to make a kind of Etch-a-Sketch.

First, draw some arrows and buttons for ‘pen up/down’, ‘colour change’, ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ in a very soft pencil on some paper. Draw tracks and wire up the arrows to the cursor keys on the Makey Makey. Pen up/down goes to the spacebar, colour change is S, bigger is W and smaller goes to key A. If you don’t have a Makey Makey, you can still use keys on your computer’s keyboard.

The code for Scratch-a-Sketch is here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/20658351/ – you can play online in the Flash version if you like, you don’t even need Scratch installed.

Unlike a traditional Etch-a-Sketch, you can lift the pen up to move around without drawing, change colour and pen size, and combine keys such as 2 arrow keys to draw decent diagonal lines.

There are loads of ways you could get children to extend this: sound, a better way of choosing colours – sky’s the limit!


crocodile clip on wedding ring makes great hands-free earth!

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Makey Makey paper and pencil game controller

Posted on April 10, 2014 by blogmywiki

I had three goes at this before I got it to work: making a game controller from a sheet of paper with pencil drawings on. Pencil lead is made of graphite, which conducts electricity, so the Makey Makey allows you to draw buttons with pencil. It’s like designing and making your own printed circuit board, only with rather cheap, disposable tools.

First up I tried an HB pencil (I guess this equates to a No. 2 pencil in the US). No luck. Then a rather cool solid graphite pencil of my daughter’s. This almost worked, but wasn’t reliable. Then eldest son lent me his 6B Koh-I-Noor art pencil. This was The Business. Our new pencil and paper gamepad works a treat. (Don’t ask me what a 6B pencil is in US currency, but it’s soft, baby, darn soft.)

I tweaked the Scaredy Squirrel Scratch game code so the game is started by a spacebar rather than clicking the green flag, so I could add a start button too. Awesome!

And speaking of pencil grades… I just found this splendid poem by Spike Milligan:

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

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Makey Makey

Posted on April 10, 2014 by blogmywiki

I am very late to the Makey Makey party, I know. In case you don’t know what it is, it’s a gizmo that plugs into just about any computer’s USB port. The computer thinks it’s a normal USB keyboard (MacOS X gets a bit hilariously sniffy about it, but it does work), and you can wire up anything that will conduct a small amount of electricty to it, and trigger keypresses by touching it. What does this mean? It means you can play a game or a piano by touching bananas, of course.

I’d never seen one until the other night, and the price always put me off. But at Code Club’s second birthday party, that all changed. Thanks to Marc Grossman for showing me the Makey Makey hooked up to Scratch (and for giving me loads of tips about teaching Scratch as well!). He showed me Play Doh controllers and also pointed out one thing I hadn’t realised: you need to be earthed, which means holding a wire in one hand to allow you to make a circuit by touching a blob of Play Doh (or banana, or market vegetable of your choice). The chief downside of this was that I had to put my beer down, but hey, I made the sacrifice in the name of science.

I was sold on the Makey Makey. I can see that it’s a fantastically simple way of hooking even more children into the possibilities of computers, of Scratch and Making. So yesterday I rushed out and bought one.

For our first project, we opened Scratch and set up some events that would play different noises when different arrow keys were pressed. Here’s Tilly demonstrating it.

Next I opened up my Scaredy Squirrel Scratch game I used in Year 2 – as this uses the arrow keys to move Scaredy around the screen, we didn’t even need to modify the code, just hooked up 4 bananas in a gamepad arrangement. Here’s Henry playing the game with bananas.

But it’s when you flip the Makey Makey over that things start to get really interesting…

I had thought all it could do was emulate cursor keys, space bar and clicks. Not so. On the back there are pins on the left that emulate other keyboard keys: W, A, S, D, F and G. Even more interestingly, the pins on the right emulate mouse movements and clicks. This has got me thinking about making some object that will allow you to draw on the screen – Scratch would be a good environment to get this going.

But there is still more. Intrigued by the ‘output’ pins on the top, I did a bit more digging, and it turns out that the Makey Makey contains an Arduino! This makes the price seem a bit more reasonable. It also means you can reprogram it so that it emulates any keypresses you like. This could be important if you want to use the Makey Makey to control a piece of software with key controls you can’t customise and which aren’t supported by default by the Makey Makey. The output pins also trigger 5v when certain keys are made, meaning that you can also control other things with the Makey Makey, such as motors and lights.

My mind is buzzing with ideas for the Makey Makey now – I think we might try drawing some buttons on paper with pencil next, or make a musical keyboard with jam jars filled with water. I really, really wish I’d had one when I was in year 2, now. They would have loved it, and I know they would have come up with some amazing ideas for what to make with it.

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Everything is Awesome in Uncanny Valley

Posted on April 7, 2014 by blogmywiki

Let me make one thing clear: I love The Lego Movie. It is truly awesome. I only just saw it, and yet despite all the glowing reviews and comments, I was not disappointed (though I would have enjoyed it even more had a certain radio film review show not told me about the shift in genre in the third act, but I’ll let that go.)

The look of the film is amazing – I had assumed it would be clean Toy Story or Lego Star Wars-type computer animated rendering of bricks. But they made it look like it was stop-motion animation with real bricks. The lighting – for example when Emmet drives the motorbike through the house – is just astonishing. The bricks all have small flaws in their surfaces to make them look real, the printing on the bricks is blobby and looks like a real screen print.

But I have one tiny niggle. I felt that the flaws in the bricks were, perhaps, too exaggerated. The thing that always marked Lego out as superior to other brick-based construction toys was the quality of the plastic and the mouldings – yes they aren’t perfect, but they’re damn close. And at times some of the Lego pieces in The Lego Movie looked close to the real thing, but possibly not quite close enough.

And that got me wondering whether The Lego Movie had wandered into aanother world, aside from The Wild West, Middle Zealand and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Had The Lego Movie shifted into Uncanny Valley?

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, Uncanny Valley is why The Polar Express is a hideous, terrifying movie that shouldn’t even be shown to sensitive adults, let alone children. It’s why Pixar’s Tin Toy is an uneasy watch. It’s that thing that happens when computer-generated images are close, but not close enough, to real humans (and animals too, I’d argue). Good designers and animators stylise their characters to make them more cartoon-like, to avoid this deep sense of uneasiness. Can Uncanny Valley, I wonder, also apply to (ahem) inanimate objects?

So the third act… well, here’s a spoiler alert. If you’ve not seen The Lego Movie yet – look away now. I wonder if the very real, flawed, chewed look and feel of the action taking place in the Lego universe part of the film is correct when considered against the real live action world of the third act. The Lego characters themselves are, until Emmet falls, unaware of any external reality (hello, The Matrix). So would it have made more sense, in terms of visual grammar, to have these scenes shot in pure, cleanly rendered CGI blocks? And then, when he falls, Emmet could become imperfect. All the characters could become imperfect – the final scene could be shot in the faux-stop motion style. It would mirror the way Hobbes changes from a real tiger to a toy tiger in the Calvin Hobbes frames where adults (or Suzie) are present.

Or perhaps I think about things too much, and I just need to kick back and relax with an overpriced coffee. Everything is Awesome. Everything is Awesome.

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