Last week I talked about house painting and the Digital Windchime. Here’s a little progress there:

House Painting:

• During our monday jam sesh, we talked a bit about drawing from memory. I came away with an experiment to try – namely to try and draw the house I posted last week from memory and without looking – I wore a blindfold and drew for about 5 minutes. I set up a ruler so that I could go back to a starting location to try and figure out where I was in space. Here are the results of the quick sketches. 
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• I think there is something to this. I like the free form aspect of it. Thinking next week I’ll experiment with drawing the individual aspects of the houses and neighborhoods from memory and making a collage of the things to make a scene. Stay tuned. 

Digital Windchime:

• I picked up a 10 pack of joysticks from the ‘zon. As Mr. Miller has suspected, the sprint force in these joysticks are pretty strong. Flipping it upside down with a string attached it was fairly difficult to have the joystick move in an organic way that did not “snap” the joystick back to center when it was close. So I went about seeing if I could deconstruct one to see how it worked and if it would be easy to modify one. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible not to break the joystick with my level of patience.
• Joysticks are delightfully simple in principle. They have two outputs of position, x axis and y axis, telling the computer where in space the joystick is. Some of the genius of the joystick is the translation of rotational motion (UI) into cartesian coordinates. 
• On a hardware level, there are two axles that can rotate – allowing you to move the joystick as one does. These axles are connected to a variable resistor (or potentiometer). Resistors convert voltage into heat. A variable resistor can turn all the voltage coming into heat (0v) or none of it into heat (5v) and everywhere in between. Turning the joystick all the way to one end then =0v and to the opposite end =5v. If you read the voltage on the other side of the resistor, you have an analog signal that directly relates the joystick position to a voltage. 
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• The image on the left is the joystick with both “potentiometers” bent (and broken) down. 
• Destroying the metal cage part allowed me to see where the spring was in the center that caused the stick to snap back. I was able to “rebuild” it and could confirm that a springless system could work the way I was hoping for the windchime. 
• Unfortunately I don’t think I can deconstruct the joystick without ruining it. More tests to come. Otherwise I’ll need to use other methods of generating the sounds.

Other ideas from the week:

• Personal font:  how dynamic are fonts? My techie friends plz halp? I know that some fonts can connect letters in different ways if next to one another. My handwriting is similar except it has a few different modes – fast mode, neat mode, drunk mode, thoughtful mode, capitals, etc. -could a Font that is dynamic with speed typed, looks slopier and hurried. Connects differently. As speed slows gets more neat and together. 
• Group Font: everyone in tipsy tuesday writes the alphabet multiple times. Letters are scanned and made into fonts. “Tipsy Tuesday font” is a randomly selected letter from the handwriting of the group for each letter typed.