Deciding to go Visual

After discussing for over a week me and Kathleen have decided that it would be better for us to go with just the Microphone option due to the lack of knowledge on some of the certain areas we need to cover, also we feel that it would probably be better doing something in Processing with the information we get as we feel it would be a better solution to visualise the information in a programme created for this kind of situation.

Detecting passing cars

Whilst we are going to get the main bulk of information from the sounds of the vehicles, me and and Kathleen have also thought it might be a good idea to maybe detect the actual passing of a car and how long it takes to go pass by having an infrared beam going across the road and when a car breaks the beam see how long its broken for, this should give us a good indication of either speed of a vehicle or size i.e. wagons.

Sound Recording

After talking to Lee, we have decided to go with the simpler option of getting the project working with using standalone microphones and running it through Flash, I also told Lee about the other quirkier idea of trying to find out what radio stations cars were listening to and I think he liked the idea, but he believes it may cost a few pounds to get it working but I am still going to do some research into that.

Arduino and Sounds CONT:

After thinking some more into how to record sound levels via an Arduino board I stumbled across this clip on YouTube and thought it would be good as an indication that me and Kathleen can actualy succeed in this project by using an Arduino board.
So this is the Video Clip:

Arduino and Sounds

Trying to think how me and Kathleen can incorporate an Arduino board into our project I came up with the idea of maybe hacking a Sound Level recorder and attaching it to an Arduino board, possibly analogue as this will give us a more natural read out instead of just digital 1's and 0's. The read out that we get can then be Incorporated into our flash files as a way of determining how much of the building would be eroded this I hope would give us the desired effects.

So now to buy a few things and to get started, back to the good old days of electronics.

Arduino Info

Well I thought it would be a good idea for me to give you some more useful information on Arduino boards, so I decided to go and get some and list it here just in case you fancy a tinker yourselves.

Picture of an Arduino Board (many to choose from)

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The micro controller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.

so this is just a taster for what they can do, this is a link to the website in case you fancy buying one are seeing what else it can do. http://www.arduino.cc/

Arduino Boards

Today we was introduced to Arduino boards, basically they are little circuit boards that can be programmed to do many different things, such as creating a cool disco flashing light :), but the main power of the Arduino board comes from both its programmable and its modularity to become many different things such as add a water sensor and then you have a fully working water depth gauge.

I have already had an idea that was mentioned in Lee Nutbean's lesson in that we could have two walkie talkie that transmit to each other but instead of powering the speaker on the receiver walkie talkie we could power an electrical fart machine might be good for a prank.

GPS Tracking Complete

So we have finally finished our GPS map and with Kathleen artistic skills we have craftily generated an image of a duck out of the information we collated through our journey.

This is an image of are we was going to cover before plotting anything:

This is the map after collecting the GPS data:

And this is our finale GPS drawing, Thanks to Kathleen:

GPS Tracking

GPS tracking, by many people can be considered as merely tracking were some one has been, but for a few members of society GPS tracking can be a form of art when you map it all out and connect the dots (links), so with this in mind me and Kathleen decided to go for a drive around the Plymouth area tracking our movements and the rules that we decided to come up with was that for every traffic light that we came to (main lights not pedestrian ones) we would make a decision to either turn left or right but not straight on by picking out paper pieces out of a tub that had left or right on them (Kathleen idea) this made sure that every turn was random. This gave us a huge area to travel so we decided to limit the experiment to a max of 30 minutes.

We have nearly completed the drawing so keep watching this space.

Hertzian Space

Was watching TV yesterday and I noticed how the little things can interfere with radio waves, The thing that I am talking about is the Airfreshner in my bedroom, how it interferes with the TV signal every time it sprays. this got me thinking more again on the same idea of radio waves that are transmitted around the Stonehouse and how they might be distorted by the traffic and even the people walking around the area.

Back to Class

Hello all, not been on here for a while with it been Christmas. So how did the first day go, to be honest not to bad got our new assignment brief today. In the brief Gianni wants us to do some work on Hertzian Space - this in lame man terms means that the we have to do some research of radio frequency how they act, how long frequency last for and what can happen to frequencies with human interaction. All this has to bind with what we are doing for Stonehouse, so i have been thinking of still sticking with the idea of traffic noise but I also thought about maybe getting data from radio signals that bounce around the given area and maybe even detect what radio stations are been played by cars. The Idea i think is good but I am not sure if it would be possible with limited technology and knowledge but then again when there's a will there's a way...

So after having a chat in class we all went down to Stonehouse to take some blue tooth readings. The device we used for the readings was our own telephones and as I didn't have mine at the time we used Kathleen's to take some notes down of how many devices we could find with our phones. To be honest we didn't really find that many, as I think the signal for blue tooth is too limiting and therefore we were mainly picking up the other groups Blue tooth signals.

We have compiled a map of what we found in Union street and we will be doing a test again with WI-FI other the following week in our own time.

Well here is the map/Image of how many devices we found:

Stonehouse Projection Idea

Well today didn't really have much to do so decided to create a little animation of what the project might look like, I have kept to the idea of sound waves eating away the built up grime and came up with a first version animation that I made in Flash just so I could get a feel of what it might look like. Obviously the final result should look a lot better and a lot neater but for now I feel this gives a good example.

Please not the animation will load, it just takes a while as its a big file 2.5mb.

Measurement

Today me and Kathleen decided to go down to Stonehouse and get some measurements for our projection, the measurements we got were Width: 289cm x Height 153cm (both sides) and middle x 183cm. So as you can probably tell the window we will be projecting into will be an arch window. I have attached a diagram to show this.

Window:

Copyrights Approved

Good news for us, our photos have been approved for us to publish them on our blog so here are the pictures hopefully they are of some use, I feel that with this information and maybe a trip to the library for hopefully some more photos we should be able to represent what it looked like at the time and also what me and Kathleen thought was to add a twist to the projection by maybe adding a scene out of the Cinderella pantomime as this was the first ever showing at the Grand Theatre .on the 26th December 1869 at 6pm.




Courtesy of Plymouth and West Devon records Office: 828/9 - Sale Particulars,828/8/2 - Page 99 of Lease Holdings, 828/8/2 - Page 104 of Lease Holdings, 1395/17 - Floor plans, 1395/18 - Floor plans, 1358/1 - Handbill for "The Eternal City", PCC/60/1/294 - Blue prints, 114/48/41 - Application for registration, 2887/22 - Photographs of interior Grand Theatre, 114/216 - Incident reports

Collecting Data

I feel today has been a very productive day for our project. Me and Kathleen decided that for us to fully achieve what we want to do as our projection we needed to know what the building was built for and also if possible what the building inside looked like before it was ruined and after deciding we needed more info we then booked a place for us to go down to the Plymouth and West Devon archives building and find some more information out. After spending a few hours in there we found a lot information about our little (BIG) building even letter about an army truck damaging some of the building exterior and the army paying a whopping £60 out for the damages. I did take some photos of some of the information we found but we are not allowed to publish them until we get the copyrights for us to do so.

How to get there

After having a good think on what we might do, We have decided that one of the main packages we would possibly use would be Adobe Aftereffects this is due to us taking an image of an existing building and then manipulating it to create our desired effects. So start to gt our hands dirty and start learning Aftereffect.

Going Ahead

Well after thinking about the new Idea me and Kathleen have decided to go ahead with the new Idea for our projection. So just to recap the Idea for the projection that we are going to do is the one where we take information such as traffic sound levels and surrounding pub sound levels and then project this back into the Grand Theatre (Opposite Aldi) as sound waves eating away at the built up grime and then revealing the way the Grand Theatre looked like (to certain extent) and in a way bringing life back into something that is run down and disused. so the next step is to find out what it might of looked like.

Possible new Idea

Just been having a think about the old Idea and to be honest I feel it may be a bit childish. So after listening to some more of Shaun's discussions I have come up with the idea of using both mine and Kathleen's ideas of using sound from both the pubs and traffic and then illustrating this as sound waves eating into a building and over a short period of time chipping away the out building skin and showing something new still building on the projecting life into a derelict building.

Just a bit more on this after discussing it with Kathleen we have decided to use the traffic noise and use the ambiance of the surrounding pubs and the Idea is to illustrate my traffic sounds chipping away the past whilst Kathleen's ambiance data is been inserted into the derelict building and we feel this would be achieved by both been run at the same time and the finished product should show a vibrant new interior of a derelict building.

Bad Location - Maybe

After actually going down and starting to take some more notes on the Grand Theatre we have again decided that this is not the correct location as previously mentioned the main road restricts our possibilities of projecting the image across the road (unless we can get a road closure all in the name of education:-)). We are again back to the drawing board for finding a location but least now it will be a bit easier as we know roughly what we want to project.

Location Continued

After been in Shaun's lesson today I feel the location we have decided on may not be too good as we are restricted to having a big white transit to haul around the equipment (in need of some Sherpas) we will have to go down at a given time and see what the location is like then we can decide whether or not to continue with our location.