Portrait of My Dog and I On a Harley, originally uploaded by dailyinvention.

Enjoying the good weather and the sights. It’s good to see spring here in full force.

Breadboard and Arduino Electromagnet Layout

The Code:

const int SWITCH = 9; //pin for the MOSFET
const int BUTTON = 7; //pin for the Button
const int LED = 13; //pin for the LED
int val = 0; //used to store state of input pin
int old_val = 0; //used to store previous value of val
int state = 0; //1 = LED off and 0 = LED on

void setup()
{
pinMode(SWITCH, OUTPUT); //Map output to MOSFET
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT); //Map input to Button
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); //Map output to LED
Serial.begin(300); //Initiate a data connection between the board and a computer
}

void loop()
{
val = digitalRead(BUTTON); //Read input value of Button and store it

//check for change in value
if ((val == HIGH) && (old_val == LOW)) {
state = 1 - state;
delay(10);
}

old_val = val; //store the old value
if (state == 1) {
Serial.println("OFF"); //send off message back to the computer
digitalWrite(SWITCH, LOW); //turn off flow of electricity to magnet
digitalWrite(LED, LOW); //turn off LED
} else {
Serial.println("ON"); //send on message back to the computer
digitalWrite(SWITCH, HIGH); //turn on flow of electricity to magnet
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); //turn on LED
}
}


Wait!  Although Arduino may sound like Italian slang for a part of the human body I assure you I’ve been occupying myself in other ways.

You may have heard of the Maker Movement and the wonderful interactive projects prototyped using these versatile little boards.  Well, I finally jumped on board myself.  If you look at the schematics to the right you will see the layout of my very first original project.  About a month ago I was experimenting with home-made electromagnets and posted this video on Youtube.  This weekend I integrated the electromagnet with Arduino controller.  I’ve put together a video demonstration below showing it in action.

If I haven’t plugged it enough in the video, I really got a lot out of Massimo Banzi’s “Getting Started with Arduino” book. I believe it to be a must-read for any noob using these controller boards. The illustrations and examples are very simple to follow. I also referenced the Arduino web site: arduino.cc in the video.

So, a few weeks ago I got a chance to visit Northern California and Southern Oregon.  Some of the most beautiful country I’ve seen.  In my week-and-a-half of hiking, mineral baths, good beer, grass-fed beef, and other great endeavors I got a chance to visit the Redwood National Park and the state parks along the Northern Pacific Coast of California where the great trees reside.  A redwood tree can live to be 2,000 years old, if permitted to do so.  Redwoods are almost impervious to fire, because of their mass, so a whole forest would never go up in flames as easily as the other pine and fir-covered lands that make up Northern California.  These groves had to have been thousands of years old.

The famous library of Alexandria, Egypt was a great collection of knowledge.  The ancients gathered thought throughout the lands of Alexander’s conquests and eventually it became the first research institute.  Theories, ideas, and concepts were tested and developed.  One of these thinkers, Aristarchus of Samos had a curious idea that the Earth traveled around the Sun as documented by Archimedes.  Of course we do not have access to Aristarchus’ original scrolls.  Several times the library was consumed in flames and much of the knowledge generated by the greatest thinkers of the ancient world was lost.  It wasn’t until about a thousand or more years later that Copernicus came to this same conclusion; the redwoods kept growing.

Lately I’ve been daydreaming about the trees or contemplating something Carl Sagan said on a Cosmos episode and every once in a while I think about where we are today.  I think about hard drives and the fact that the Library of Congress is archiving our Twitter feeds.  Not to say that all the best and brightest use Twitter, but it is an example of where we are today.  It is a snapshot of our collective history.   The World Wide Web, in which Twitter inhabits, is too.  That and a repository of knowledge.  The trees are touching the sky.

I see a lot of push away from the static (and flammable) printed page to the dynamic world of the digital media.  Information is readily available but easily changes with the click of a mouse button.  Take Wikipedia for example as a constantly-evolving database of information. But alas, the internet is a large array of interconnected computers and all this knowledge, all this history, is stored on devices that require a flow of electrical current to perform.  The redwoods require water and sunlight.

Say that the human population was wiped out by disease, war, disaster and famine (you know, the typical stuff) and some alien race happened upon our planet.  A curious race that is in to planetary archeology.  Go along with me here.  How readily available would our hard drives be to these visitors?  Would they have the technology to decode our zeros and ones.  They would probably still see the trees (unless we removed them all).

Hammurabi’s code was written in stone that we have unearthed.  In the distant future will our digital world be as easily extracted?  Will our systems sustain our own disasters?  I think in many ways that our ideas are as fragile as those that sat in the library of Alexandria.  Our knowledge is fleeting, as are we; only nature perpetuates.

Recently, I went to an Apple training session, which may have been more of a sales pitch, but it was good and informative and we picked up some tools from it.  One of the questions that one of my colleagues brought up was whether Apple was going to support Flash on its mobile device browsers.  The salespeople alluded somewhat to HTML5.

I’ve been watching the recent emergence of Webkit as a popular browser engine. It’s the backbone for Safari and many browsers for mobile devices, touting major support for HTML5 and CSS3.  I’ve also recently read an article where Wired magazine had formed a partnership with Adobe to develop their magazine app for the iPad.  Surprisingly it uses Flash, but within the Adobe AIR platform.  AIR is platform agnostic and provides a way in which your Flash/Flex/AJAX web application can be run as a desktop/mobile application.  This, to me, seems like an interesting move for Adobe.

CSS3, on the other hand is looking to be a contender with Flash animation (jQuery too).  The Art of Web posted a great article on how to use CSS3′s 2d transformations properties.  Make sure you are viewing it in Safari or other Webkit browsers for best results.

As a CSS fan, this looks very promising.  No Flash, no jQuery knowledge; None of that is required.  You just need an understanding of CSS.  As Apple, this probably looks like an opportunity to make their browser (Webkit) the standard, especially on mobile devices right now.  Also maybe another opportunity to rid itself of Flash as a browser application.  The only drawback to HTML5 CSS3 is the same drawback that affects all new adoptions of HTML, XHTML and CSS.  It takes some time for all browsers to adopt these standards and takes time for developers to use such standards; some don’t fully adopt them anyway (thank you, Microsoft).

Apple is leading the race nonetheless and I think HTML5 and CSS3 should be taken seriously.  I don’t think Adobe should be ruled out though when it comes to engaging, interactive media.