I’ve been working on a project in my spare time with two friends to create some ambient light controllers, so I thought I’d just post two short videos to demonstrate the current state of the project.  In the current iteration, they can be used as wall-washers or they can be enclosed to create ambient light cubes/spheres/pentagonal cupolas/rhombo-hexagonal dodecahedrons/etc.  Each module is addressable and uses a PIC16F628 to control each of the RGB LEDs (which were purchased from the eBay seller jeledhk with the description “Superflux RGB 5mm R/H LEDLamp 8Kmcd COMMON CATHODE”).  The PCBs were created using BatchPCB.com for $5 each (+ ~$15 total for S&H and setup) and are beautifully etched, drilled, and silkscreened (although it took about 1.5 months to receive them).  Ok, less talk, more videos; one video on the front page and another after the jump:

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I recently purchased an iPhone and have wanted software that not only gave location information, like Erica Sadun’s wonderful findme software (or my, ahem, GPS projects), and sent phone information, like Fuel’s great WeeGee anti-theft package, but combined the tools into a more robust tracking utility. In other words, I wanted both location and information tracking in my iPhone. So, I set about combining the utilities into a script that will send location updates periodically to twitter and will email me with call history, SMS history, web history, location, and pictures if it is stolen. Cool!

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Ok, so my last post was a little premature. I was able to modify the source code to get Connection Cloud back up and running! If you use Facebook, I always appreciate individuals trying out my applications (such as Connection Cloud) and giving me feedback.

A snapshot of my social network on Facebook.  Red circles are girls, Blue circles are boys, and Black circles are undefined (i.e., the individual’s privacy settings disallow 3rd party information acquisition)

Unfortunately, there was a code change over at Facebook and my Connection Cloud application was broken. It was causing errors left and right, so I disabled it so that I could try to debug the problem (hence why it is no-longer accessible). I have had so much work as a first year graduate student that I have been unable to focus on the Connection Cloud application and fix it. Hopefully I will have some time this winter break to look at the code (along with focusing on other prior commitments); however, I cannot guarantee that I will have the free time to get it fully debugged and working in the short-term.

Every once in a while I think of a project and just have to pull something together to satisfy my own inner-geekiness. This was one of those projects.

In my humble opinion, few images are as personal and as striking as the visualization of an individual’s social network. These are constructed in such a manner that an individual’s friends are displayed in an image or a dynamic application and the connections between them are visualized. Traditionally, it can be difficult to gather the data necessary to identify an individual’s friends and the relationships among friends; however, social networking websites (such as Myspace.com, Friendster.com, and Facebook.com) have been collecting this information for the past few years. Facebook recently began providing developers access to their databases and, in effect, gave developers the ability to create a map of an individual’s personal relationships. Since then, developers have been taking advantage of these newfound sources of information in order to provide Facebook users with fun and interesting “applications” for their personal profiles.

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