Top Down View

What now?

Well, it was a one-off… a little bit of fun for the Glitch Launch Party and an excuse for me to explore the Arduino platform. However I just noticed today that the in-game shoes have a couple more tricks up their sleeves (do shoes have sleeves?). When you’re away from the keyboard in the game and your Glitch falls asleep, the shoes pulse gently in time with your breathing. Also when you laugh or frown, the lights have their own emotions that mirror your character’s. This got me thinking about ways to extend the project.

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers: Epilogue

So it’s all put together… but what do they look like? Show us!

OK, OK… your patience is finally rewarded, here’s a video of what they look like in action:

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers – In Action!

At this point I’ve got a jumble of wires, crocodile clips and circuit boards spread across half my desk. Nothing too shoe-related going on yet and definitely not portable.

To bring this to life, I needed two basic set of things:

• something in which to mount the Lilypad, power board and batteries. My original idea was something along the lines of a money belt with the Lilypad in the small of my back and a wire to the button somewhere easily accessible
• something to hold the LEDs and attach to the shoes. I wasn’t going to modify the shoes in any way so my original idea was some sort of a fabric overshoe sewn together and held in place with stretchy straps and velcro.

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers – Putting It All Together

I had a couple of sets of changes I needed to make to my test code.

Firstly I needed the ability to change the effects mode using the button. I originally added this by testing to see if the button was down, incrementing a global variable that I used for the mode, a switch statement to divert program flow depending on the current mode value and different functions for each effects mode. The effect was pretty to look at but the code was even worse than the previous test: overly long and the patterns were defined by the actual program logic – meaning that more program code would have to be written in order to add more patterns and the code to control 8 LEDs would be twice as long. You can see that particular iteration here: http://topdownview.com/arduino/glitch/Glitch_multimode

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers – Final Code

At this point I broke out the croc clips and the LEDs and started experimenting. Whenever you click ‘Upload’ in the Arduino IDE it compiles your current code, transfers it to your Lilypad, reboots the Lilypad and starts the code running – so the feedback loop for trying out ideas & seeing what works is very fast.

My first test hardware involved connecting the button and 4 of the LEDs to pads on the Lilypad. I started from the basic Blink program and added more LEDs and more delays to give some visual effects. I also added the ability to detect button presses in order to change the pattern.

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers – First Test

So now it’s time to plug things together and start programming.

The Arduino development environment is super simple to work with. The tools are written in Java so they’re cross-platform. If you’re running Ubuntu then installation is simply a matter of visiting the Software Centre, typing in ‘Arduino’ and clicking the install button for the Arduino IDE program that pops up. If you’re on Windows or Mac then it’s not much more complicated than that either – download the software from the Arduino website and install.

Then plug one end of the programming cable into your Lilypad (be sure to get it the right way round – the board is marked B and G for the Black and Green wires in the cable) and the other end into your computer. At this point your computer discovers a new serial port provided by the USB cable – again if you’re running Ubuntu it just works but if you’re running Windows to Mac there’s help here to guide you through installing the necessary device drivers.

Run the Arduino IDE and go to Tools->Board to select the correct board that you’re programming. In my case it’s the “Lilypad Arduino w/ATmega328″. Then click on Tools->SerialPort to check that your system’s detected and selected the correct serial port.

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers – Hello World

First things first… what’s the final design going to look like? My plan was for 4 LEDs along the outside edge of each shoe – 2 red and 2 yellow to match the colours of the Glitch shoes. Then run wires up inside each leg of my jeans to the Lilypad and power supply mounted around my waist. Add a button to allow switching between different flashing modes and some connectors at the ankle and waist to allow things to be detached and we’re set.

So what hardware are we going to need?

Continue reading Glitch and the LED sneakers – The Parts

I’ve been playing Tiny Speck‘s Glitch for the last six months. I don’t play much in the way of computer games these days – I don’t play MMOs and I run Linux so I don’t exactly have a bundle of games at my disposal, but Glitch is different. The game is a lot of fun, the artwork is beautiful and the writing is consistently funny and quirky – but what really elevates the game are the people:

Continue reading Glitch and the LED Sneakers – Intro

Nope, not a typo – an attendee survey just landed in my inbox and one of the questions was asking who I’d like to see speak at next year’s Art Of Marketing.

One of the comments I heard many times last week was “isn’t it odd there’s no women speaking here?”. If you assume that women are equally represented in the field of marketing speakers, you’ve got a 0.5^5 chance of getting an all-male schedule. Wow… that’s one in 32 (yes, maths was my first love).

So, whilst I’m not in favour of positive discrimination, I was quite keen to get a couple of women on the schedule for next year. Let’s take a look at their suggestions on the survey form:

Biz Stone – co-founder Twitter
Charlene Lee – shoe designer
Chip Heath – professor of Organizational Behavior and co-author of “Made To Stick”
Chris Anderson – editor-in-chief of Wired, author of “The long Tail”
Chris Brogan – speaker, blogger, co-author of “Trust Agents”
Dan Ariely – professor of behavioral economics and author of “Predictably Irrational”
Dan Roam – author “The Back Of The Napkin”
Dana White – president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship
Daniel Pink – author of “Drive”, speechwriter and motivational speaker
Gary Vaynerchuk – wine expert, founder of winelibrary.tv, author of “Crush It”
Guy Kawasaki – co-founder of alltop.com, previously chief evangelist at Apple, author of “Enchantment”
Malcolm Gladwell – author “The Tipping Point”, writer for NYT
Mark Zuckerberg – founder Facebook
Paul Lavoie – Co-founder TAXI (advertising agency)
Seth Godin – speaker, blogger, author of “Tribes”
[links will open in another window/tab]

They did allow space  for a write-in, but their suggestions are 14 men and 1 woman.
And I’m not entirely sure they mean Charlene Lee… I suspect they might actually mean Charlene Li – author of “Open leadership” and co-author of “Groundswell”.

Is there something wrong here? Clearly there is. But where’s the problem? Is it that the people behind The Art Of Marketing are horrendously sexist? Somehow I doubt it. Is it that marketing is an almost exclusively male preserve? Personal experience tells me that’s very much not the case. Is it that women don’t make good entrepreneurs? Certainly not. Maybe women don’t want to become public speakers? I don’t know… I’m at a loss to explain this.

On Thursday I was lucky enough to attend The Art Of Marketing conference here in Vancouver.

Not the sort of conference I usually attend, I’m usually found at the more technical conferences in town. But take a look at the speaker list: Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, William Taylor, Mitch Joel and Avinash Kaushik. These guys are all, every last one of them, giants of the online marketing world. You could easily stage a conference with just one of those speakers as a headliner, plus a handful of relative unknowns, and expect it to be successful.

The speeches themselves were all good… and some were truly great. Plus the host, Ron Tite, did an excellent job of engaging the audience with a mixture of marketing stories and humour. I’m not entirely convinced that someone who is already established in the online marketing business would have got their money’s worth from the information presented – but I think that can be argued about most conferences. Talking with friends of mine who do this for a living and were at the conference, they generally agreed but suspected that a lot of the audience were either managers or traditional marketing people wanting to break into online. However, regardless of whether or not you already knew the information that’s been presented, it’s always useful to have it reinforced. Plus the networking opportunities were also awesome. And, as one of a relatively small number of developers there, a lot of the people I spoke with were interested to hear a different viewpoint on the topics discussed.

I took notes through all five speeches but, given the mesmerizing nature of some of the presentations, the notes are short, bullet-pointed and bearing more than a passing resemblance to a drunken spider’s journey home from the pub. However, for those of you that couldn’t make it on Thursday, I’ll write them up and post them speaker by speaker.