faludi
My friends and family are always coming and going. I sometimes follow their flights, especially when they are showing up at my door, or departing on a life-expanding adventure. It’s easy to do if I stay in front of the computer with a web page open. However, when I’m at the computer I’m usually working on something else that gets in the way, and away from the screen there’s no information at all.
For today’s 7 in 7 project I created a Desktop Flight Tracker that physically indicates the altitude of a live aircraft flight from online data. The system includes an Arduino microcontroller with embedded Internet connection and a small servo motor attached to a model jet airliner. Once the airline name and flight number is loaded into the system, the model jet rises off the desktop just as the real flight takes off. The model continues to rise as the actual plane climbs to its cruising altitude, then holds its position. (I like to imagine that tiny cocktails are being served inside.) For descent and landing, the model lowers itself to the desktop, just as the real flight touches down at its destination. Please keep your seatbelts fastened until the aircraft has come to a full stop at the gate.
In the hour or so since I got the prototype working properly, I’ve tracked a couple flights as they cruised into the New York area, descended and touched down at JFK—both informative and entertaining. Bon voyage!
katehartman
Ok, so this is sort of a cheat, but I today I finally documented a prototype I made a while back. It’s called the Discommunicator. It’s a tool for communication that blocks conversation. It buffers words and enforces eye contact.
Intended for heated discourse, the Discommunicator allows each person to say all the things outloud that shouldn’t actually be heard by the other person. The device is such that the two users are forced to look at each other so they are aware of the emphatic nature of what is being said, but the specific words are absorbed by the solid form they are being spoken into.
For future prototypes, I’d like to make something a bit softer that also covers the ears so that it becomes a more immersive experience. This is one in a upcoming series of “limited communication devices”.
katehartman
I’ve been thinking about making this dress for 5 years. Maybe 6.
I got the idea when I was a professional sandwich- and salad-maker at the Garden Street Cafe in Rhinebeck, New York. Our mesclun came from Little Seeds (the local farm) in huge, clear bags. When a bag was almost done, I’d hold the it up, admiring the way the delicate, green leaves arranged themselves at the bottom. “Wouldn’t it be nice…” I thought to myself, “…if I could put ALL the parts of a salad in a bag like this, and make it into a beautiful dress. A salad dress!” I’ve been thinking about the idea ever since.
I headed to the Union Square Greenmarket to get my veggies. I originally had a fancy and complicated salad in mind, but since it’s only mid-June, many of your favorite salad vegetables are not yet available locally. Instead of hitting up Whole Foods for additional ingredients, I decided to make this the Seasonal Salad Dress and just use that which could be acquired from nearby farms.
Wash, chop, bag, seal, and voila! The Salad Dress is real!
Materials: Clear trash bags, red & green leaf lettuce, carrots, radishes, red onions
Tools: The Electro-Sealer
![I’ve adapted my spam filtering example from programming from a to z as a more generic text classification Processing library. Basically, you can create a Classifier object:
Classifier filter = new Classifier();
Train it with text for category “A” and category “B”:
String[] shakespeare = loadStrings("hamlet.txt");
filter.trainA(join(shakespeare," "));String[] chekov = loadStrings("vanya.txt");
filter.trainB(join(chekov," "));
And then evaluate “unknown” text:
String toAnalzye = "To be or not to be. That is the question.";
probA = 100 * filter.analyze(toAnalzye);
println(toAnalzye + " is " + probA + " % likely to be Shakespeare");
Download library + source: classifier.zip
Download Processing example code: bayes.zip
There’s a lot more that can be done here (I have working code that doesn’t restrict the classification to a binary choice) so further updates will come eventually! Also, need to allow the library user access to the underlying hashtable of words and their counts / relative probabilities.](http://23.media.tumblr.com/Q9HSNITKpa8aocuyVyRtenSL_400.jpg)
squidsnspiders
7in7
