Lamp Painted Honda Glacier Blue

Since my wife and I moved back to New York City after a two year stint in upstate New York, we quickly found it difficult and impractical to hang on to our 2008 Honda CRV with the Glacier Blue finish.

The car, which brought us on an epic cross-country trip in 2009 (during which I proposed to her in Albuquerque) was recently sold. But I plum forgot to give the buyer my touch-up paint kit.

During an aimless drive through Putnam County once, I salvaged an interesting looking lamp with a dated color scheme - natural wood and brass. I just got around to revamping it with the chrome and glacier blue theme of the Honda. It's fitting that it should bear the colors of the vehicle with which it was discovered. I'm quite pleased.

I Circuit Bent the Hangout Feature In Google+

I'm definitely a big fan of Google+ so far, and yesterday a group of friends and I decided to use it's "Hangout" video chat feature. We thought it would be fun to keep adding more users to find the breaking point.

I think it was after getting 9 people simultaneously video-chatting that the app froze on my Macbook. I refreshed it, and this is what I saw and heard - a tableau of blank faces with soundtrack that sounded like R2D2 with a head cold. I did not know software could be circuit bent, or unintentionally datamoshed. I recorded the sound with my cell phone and did a screen shot of the page, so this fairly accurately recreates what was going on. Enjoy!

Vintage Macintosh Mouse Case Mod

When I was a kid I had one of the first Macintosh computers (you remember, the ones that looked like big cinder blocks.) To this day I love the classic styling of the original mac mouse. I happened to still have one, and recently modded it to accept USB compatible optical components while being virtually indistinguishable from its original design. I'm happy to say it works perfectly, and now I'm the envy of all my local geeks and hipsters.


The first attempt at the mod was with this microsoft optical mouse. I had it on hand, and it looked like I could hack it to make it fit. Though in order to do this, I had to saw off the front part of the MS PC Board that contained the buttons and scroll wheel.


This didn't seem to be a problem at first, because there were no other essential components in the part I was planning on cutting off. Also, I would only be needing one button since I wasn't interested in modifying the external functionality of the mouse (some people have tried this with IMHO hideous results).
I tested the IC with some wire probes, and found which pins controlled the left-click. My plan was to break these out and fabricate a new mount for the button. This would've been fairly labor-intensive, not to mention that because of space constraints, it would put the button smack on top of the IC.

I fiddled around with the configuration and tried drawing up a jig to make it work, but decided to scrap the idea and shelved the project for a while.

When I decided to come back to it, I tossed the Microsoft mouse and went for a Macintosh ProMouse instead. When I opened it up I could tell right away it was going to be easier. The PCB fit into the vintage mouse with just some minimal trimming, and the click button was mounted smack in the middle. It was even the same make and similar type switch as the old mouse. You could tell these two mice were part of the same lineage. It was actually a bit eerie.



I traced out the footprint of the ProMouse and cut the silhouette out of the vintage mouse with a dremel. I popped it into the spot with epoxy, waited for it to dry, then sanded the whole bottom flush.

Through trial and error, I mocked up a button assembly that would mate well with the switch on the ProMouse's PCB. Once I found a hot-glue prototype I was happy with, I took it apart and reglued with JB Weld.

The last step was splicing open the rubber piece the cord fits into. Once done, I hot glued the new USB cord in place.

The Bounce Announce Automated Musical Instrument

This project completed as my final project for both Physical Computing and Introduction to Computational Media at ITP.

Briefly, ping pong balls roll down 4 individual tracks, and are launched at the bottom by solenoids. The solenoids are triggered rhythmically by an Arduino.

The ping pong balls bounce sequentially onto carefully placed musical instruments. On the instruments are several piezo-electric transducers that send serial data to Processing, which responds with a visualization scheme projected from above.

Here's a video documentation of the project. Enjoy!