Atkinson Dithering, Live in Processing

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resist1_500

Once upon a time in the 1980’s, computers had 1-bit displays, and the world was in (at least, so we understand from the pictures) gray scale.  Those grays were often represented by various types of dithering patterns, of which one of the most classic is Atkinson Dithering.

Atkinson Dithering is named after Bill Atkinson, the developer of classic Macintosh applications MacPaint and HyperCard, where this type of dithering contributed heavily to the look and feel of computer images in the era.

There are already a number of neat applications (listed below) that can perform Atkinson dithering on source images.  Today we’re releasing a neat little Processing sketch that takes video from your webcam and performs Atkinson dithering on it in real time, to produce live video continuously processed with the effect.

zener_500
Screen shot: Zener grudgingly sits in front of the webcam for dithering.  With Atkinson dithering, grays and detail are preserved well, but bright and dark regions tend to be washed out.

The net result is quite surprising, because dithered images like these feel like they should only exist in an era long before webcams and computer video.  And yet, they move.

The Atkinson dithering algorithm itself is a modified version of Floyd-Steinberg dithering, where the “error” between the intended gray level at each pixel and the black or white dot that is actually drawn at each pixel is distributed to neighboring points.

physics gangsign
Windell demonstrates the “right hand rule,” a common gang sign amongst physicists.

There are actually two versions of our “mirror dither”program, at different sizes.  One runs with full resolution in a modern 800×600 window. The other, shown above slightly reduced, is just 512×342, with rounded corners and a black border— giving you live dithered video, the same shape and size as an original Macintosh screen.

You can download the two versions of our program here.  The program is a “sketch” file that runs within Processing, which you can download here for your operating system.  (We’ve written and tested it under Processing version 2.0b6; other versions may work as well.)

And as we mentioned, there are also already plenty of good applications that perform Atkinson dithering for still photos:

 

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Alpha Clock Five v2.0 and Alpha Clock White

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Alpha5v20

Today we’re releasing a major update to Alpha Clock Five, our alphanumeric LED desk clock, alarm clock, and data display device.

Alpha Clock Five still has five remarkably bright, remarkably huge 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays.  But for version 2.0, we’ve rewritten the firmware from scratch.  It’s packed with new features and it is simply a joy to use.

To name a few of those new features, Alpha Clock Five now:

  • Has a built-in calendar function so that it can smoothly alternate between displaying the time and date— a neat trick for a desk clock.
  • Smoothly fades between numbers (or letters) on the screen.
  • Has a five letter word “art clock” mode where it displays randomly chosen five-leter words from a built-in dictionary.
  • Allows you to use the second hardware serial port to daisy-chain multiple Alpha Clock Five units together for text or data display applications— for example, as we have done in the photo above.

 

And, here is one more thing that we’ve been cooking up for a long long time:A5WhiteBrightness-high

The all-new White Edition of Alpha Clock Five— with five 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays, now in stunning white.   (And, shown above with a phone for scale.)

 

Alpha Clock Five firmware v. 2.0 is now shipping on new Alpha Clock Five kits, and is also available as a download and free update for anyone who already has an Alpha Clock Five with the original firmware.  Please see our documentation wiki for details.

Read on for more about what’s new in Alpha Clock Five v. 2.0, and about the design of the White Edition.

Continue reading Alpha Clock Five v2.0 and Alpha Clock White →

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Evil Mad Scientist Halloween Projects

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EMSL Halloween Roundup

Halloween, one of our favorite holidays, is fast approaching. We’ve updated our Halloween Projects Archive once again to ensure that all of our Halloween projects are gathered together in one convenient location. If one of our projects inspires you to make something, we’d love to see the results in the flickr auxiliary.

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Open Source Pumpkin PCB

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The Great Pumpkin PCB on a pumpkin!

Eric over at Low Voltage Labs has posted up his design for a simple PCB ideal for putting an LED into a pumpkin. This is very much like our simple LED pumpkin project but in a neat, reusable format. And it makes a mighty cute little jack-o-lantern all on its own.

KiCAD - pumpkin PCB layout

He has made it available as a kit with PCB, switch, resistor, battery holder and the same candle flicker LEDs which we love so much. Unfortunately, the kit is currently sold out. Hopefully he’ll make more, if not in time for this Halloween, then at least for next year.

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OSHWA and OSI Logo Agreement

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Just announced on the OSHWA site, the OSI and OSHWA have signed a co-existence agreement around the use of the community generated open source hardware logo. From the announcement:

This agreement means that each group separately has control of their respective logo and in particular that the Open Source Hardware community will be able to continue to use the Open Source Hardware logo.

We’re very happy that the open source communities were able to work together on this issue.

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Lady Ada Lovelace Day

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OHS 2012

For Lady Ada Lovelace Day, we would like to celebrate an area of success for women in science and technology: the open source hardware community. This vibrant community has many strong women it holds up as role models. The newly formed Open Source Hardware Association is well represented with board members Alicia Gibb (president), Danese Cooper, Catarina Mota, and Wendy Seltzer. In addition, the Open Hardware Summit has been organized by women from the start: Alicia Gibb and Ayah Bdeir in 2010 and 2011, followed by Catarina Mota and Dustyn Roberts this year.

The 2012 lineup of speakers included women from all over the world and from an amazing variety of disciplines, including Leah Buechley, Ayah Bdeir, Shannon Doesmagen and Liz Barry, Katherine Moriwaki, Louisa Campbell, Liza Stark, Sylvia Todd, Erin Kennedy, Myriam Ayass, Amanda Wozniak, Meg Pirrung, Valérie Lamontagne, and Hannah Perner-Wilson.

In addition to the speakers, there were even more women presenting posters and demos, including Amelia Marzec, Cindy Harnett, Gabrialla Levine, Jennifer Jacobs, Joanna Cheung, Tesia Kosmalski, Analisa Russo and Jennifer Lewis, Margarita Benitez, Maki Komuro, and Sophi Kravitz.

All of these presenters build on the past two years of excellent content at the summit, and we look forward to the inspiring speakers of years to come.

Photo of OSHWA board members Windell Oskay, Nathan Seidle, Wendy Seltzer, Alicia Gibb and Catarina Mota at the 2012 Open Hardware Summit by Jacob Gibb.

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ComBots Cup VII

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This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, October 20-21, 2-7 pm is ComBots Cup VII at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. ComBots is the heavyweight championship for combat robotics and is one of the loudest, most entertaining robotics competitions there is.

Teams from all over the US, Canada and Brazil will be coming to California to fight for The ComBots Cup – the annual international robot combat championship now in its seventh year. The ComBots Cup is to fighting robots what the World Series is to baseball. The two-day event features robots weighing up to 220 pounds fighting to be crowned the world heavyweight champion.

To get a taste of it, check out the video above, which is one in a series from earlier events. You can get your tickets online now. We’ll hope to see you there!

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Art Controller for Aquaponics

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Control box

Logan wrote in to let us know how he is using our Art Controllers for his aquaponics project:

The system has two 140 gallon fish tanks and three 4×8 grow beds filled with grow stones. The beds water flow control is metered with Arduinos with data from Adafruit flow sensors on each bed. The important part is the bed water control, that is controlled by Art Controllers. We have almost 100 fat Talipia fish to fertilize the plants. The room is red because of all the high power LED grow lights.

grow beds under red light

The grow beds fill until a float switch trips the Art Controller that then opens a big 24 V solenoid valve draining the grow beds to a sump that pumps the cleaned water back to the fish tanks. The controller lets me program how long the beds stay drained so the plant roots get some O2 and not rot.

Thanks for sharing your project and pictures, Logan!

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