Processing sweetness...

Hey...

In terms of having no money I just used Electricity (and Internet) to go on with learning. I set my self a goal: create something similar as Casey Reas awesomeness! This would let me learn to make objects (which I already know a bit but can definetly be improved!), read the distance, let objects interact, and apply behavioral rules to objects. wooooooh :)

So to do this I opened Processing, and was already enticed by the opening screen showing kind of what I want to create:

wooooh :)

Okay so I started out trying out the dist() function between the middel of the screen and the mouse position. And I mapped this relation with the brightness of the lines:

So that was nice eh? But this isn't really what I wanted to get So I replaced the mouse by a simple dot that moves around and creates a line:

But then the middle is still the main point of it all, So now I created multiple objects (moving a bit randomly) that test each others distance:

THis is just a little beginning. Now I need to learn to create vectors and how to play with them and let the objects really interact with each other! :)

ah well, see you soon!

Frank

processing, longboard and the guidelines

Hi there!

Last night I had this thing in my head and I needed to make it:

It's a quadrilateral, a four sided polygon, which corners change every cycle and outline changes colour. You probably won't believe how long it took me to get this right, because I wanted the colours to change into one another smoothly. But the sinus gave me lots of troubles! After a while I even decided to plot the sinus function in the sketch to see if it was right, and after some slight alterations it became right :) It had something to do with the syntax....:

After showing it to a roommate he thought it would be cool to make it look like a view on a pyramid! So we tried it out:

This was also easy to do. And fun to see the effect :). but after lunch I thought I might be better to make it a bit slower and to make it move a little nicer. So now per cycle only one corner moves and has a delay of 10 miliseconds... :

Nicer eh?

anyway this was just for fun, I think I will have lots of fun this holiday on working on newer and cooller things :).

I also worked on my longboard! Because Last picture I showed it was still under a few kilos of sand and a wooden shoe! (how Dutch! :) ) But after this stage I needed to saw it, here was my set up:

Everything went fine! except that I don't really have carpenters hands so the lines aren't that straight, so don't be surprised I you find a few bumps :) :

I also needed to sand it to get some nice edges on which you can't cut your hands:

So now the deck is almost complete! I can stand on it (I tried it with books instead of wheels :) ) and it only bends a little negative, But Aurora can stand on it and it remains flat! :) So it will probably become her longboard :).

The only thing that I found was at the tail the two layers of wood didn't connect that well, and you see a gap in the epoxy:

I don't think it is to bad because I'm sure that there is epoxy in between, but still it isn't really nice yet...

So now I need to buy truck, bearings and wheels, but my research has shown that that will amount to about 130 Euros, which, incidentally, I don't have :( so I still need to wait until I can use it.

Which sucks.... But When I have the money I will make an awesome video :D and another one I think :) that is better fitted to my weight :)

Another thing that I want to do is to create 10 posters of things that I learned about designing. I want to do it in the style of this tutorial of computerarts.co.uk and I think it will be cool, but first I need to find out what I have learned :). But I think it is a good thing to do before I start my graduation project :).

So that was it for now,

See you next week!

frank

beginning of a Longboard and paper models

So last weekend there was a festival in Delft called 'Gemaakt' ('Made' in English). It was a festival with all kinds of awesome projects shown to the public. Aurora also participated with her Rewind Memetics project, But I'll get to that some other time. Another cool thing there was Durkes, these guys make longboards out of bamboo and glassfibers.

After riding a bit on them and asking them all sorts of questions I decided I wanted to make my own longboard! It would get me working with wood again, let me bend wood! Make me use Epoxy again, and also just lets me experiment with something new again. So all in all a perfect summer project :).

I found this website made by toothless that describes a very basic way of making a longboard with plywood and epoxy, nothing else! So I wanted to make one like this.

First I bought me some Wood. Birch plywood of the best quality. And cut it in two:

After deciding which is going to be the top and which the bottom I started to make the markings on the bottom one:

Then on one half of the board I put paper to draw the shape on. Aurora helped me with some other papers to let me get the perfect shape:

Then I had to cut away the excess paper, in order for me draw the line on the wood:

And then I drew the shape on the wood, flipped the paper and also drew the shape on the other side of the board:

Later I added marks where I would drill. The holes that are going to be made here will make it easier to screw both sides of plywood to each other when applying epoxy:

And I drilled the holes into them:

close up :) :

Later I went to my parents place (because of powertools) And put the epoxy on both plywood boards and put them on top of each other. Added weight to make a curve and put the screws in, to get rid of all the excess epoxy:

And a shot of the soon to be curve :) :

So, this afternoon I will start to start to saw the shape of the board out and sand the whole thing.

I already found out some things that I'll do differently when building another board: First of all make sure that the whole floor is covered with paper, I did most of the floor but didn't do the exactly every part of the floor so now we have an epoxy floor.

Another thing that I learned from a friend just now is that I should have used film because Epoxy doesn't attach to that, I didn't use it and now there is a high probability that my board is glued to the steps on which it's leaning. Which would suck.

Put the screws in first, in only the first board, and then put epoxy on and put the two boards together. Most of my time was spent hurrying to put all the screws in the wholes and then screwing them in. If they were already partly in it would have gone so much faster.

Lastly the use of glue clamps would have helped a lot. Putting the screws in didn't go perfectly as they sometimes pushed the lower board a little away creating a gap between the two boards which I didn't want. Having had clamps would probably reduced this.

Any way I also would show some pictures of some paper models that I made!

So first of all the lucky pig that I gave my mother for mothers day, it was inspired by a tutorial of computerarts.co.uk:

For my dad I made a bear for fathers day:

And for my brother I also made one for his very first day on his very first real job:

And that was it!

hopefully I'll show you a picture of a finished longboard :) !

cheers!

Frank