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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 [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]