tEp is where I spend lots of my time and is filled with all sorts of magicians, mathematicians, musicians and makers. Recently during a rooftop lemonade party we set up a hot tub and filled with water at first, later I remembered I had some left over UV dye in the car, the colorful carnage that follows should not be replicated unless you fully understand the hazards:
Author: Bilal Ghalib
I am Bilal. It's my goal to make people realize that they can do it themselves.
New Inks and Designs
At Modati Clothing we’ve been experimenting with new inks and techniques including:
All these inks combined with fresh talent Ala Sadie Scheffer and what do you have? A whole new series of shirts rolling out, you can check out our new website at Modati.com. I’m really excited about the interactivity of our new inventory. Products like the thermochromatic potholders that change to indicate their states (they catch fire when they get hot) and the mood shirt, which appears to change moods depending on if it’s bright and sunny out, or dark and scary.
It’s interesting to see how important design is to us, if you consider the fact that you are simply an aggregate of sensory inputs through time, every object you encounter becomes a part of you. So let’s keep making beautiful things, so like the girl, we can keep a bright sky above and smiles on our faces.
-Yours
Spy Candy – Hearing through your mouth – bluetooth bone conduction mold making
Bluetooth headsets are so tiny now. I was looking at one the other day and was thinking something like: “I’d eat that”. Now to follow through. What if we could put a retainer on that contained a vibrating element (like the one in tooth tunes) and a bluetooth headset put on auto pick up. We could automatically hear conversations in our heads. Neat spy gear I think, really hard core mexican gangs can replace a few teeth with this thing so that there’s no speech impediments.
So far I’ve made a plastic cast of my mouth (Shape Lock is a good acoustic conductor) and taken apart a tooth tunes toothbrush getting to the vibrating element. To make the Mouth Cast, I initially was going to use some alginate, but after finding a bag of Shape Lock all I had to do was melt it in a pot of boiling water, pull it out while it was still soft and shove it in my mouth (video coming soon). Simple enough, It made a very articulated and form fitted mold of my mouth. This along with the vibrating element means all we need to find a way to run it from bluetooth audio, might need to cram an audio amp in there too. Seems like it’ll be quite a mouthful of sound, tasty!
Organic Electronics – A sensual digital world?
So I’m interested in coming up with organic ways to display and interact with digital data. So rather than having the harsh click-track rhythm of a drum machine, what if we had some true randomness in the timing? My idea is to make varying sized holes in a tube filled with water to let water drip at different times. These drops will land on a variety of peizo sensors and then will act like a drum machine. Perhaps rather than holes we can use old camera lens apertures?
Another place to add some randomness is in visual information. We could have a sheet of thermochromatic ink laying on top of a multiplexed grid of peltier tabs that could then act like a slowly refreshed image display. I think that this would give us fuzzy boundries, similar to a brush stroke, or watercolors spreading on a page. Perhaps even at a high resolution, these effects would add a softer edge to our digital images, making photographs something we could look up closely at without seeing the harshness of our digital compression strategies, no more pixels. Yay. I’ll let you all know how this goes. I’m trying to see if it’s worth trying to make my own semiconductive materials to make this display, or if I should just use a prefabricated pelteir tab at a chunky resolution.
Anyhow, that’s whats up.
_BG
Sensor Enhanced Intuition: Hand Motion Controlled Robot
Using your natural movements to control a robotic arm helped us rapidly gain skill in manipulating it. An arduino picks up the tilt, roll and compass direction and sends the appropriate signals to the SCORbot to move the arm. This demo application shows me and my two Team Mates diffusing a fake bomb during our final presentation in CIS 381 – Industrial Robots.
We built the arduino interface to connect directly with the robots control box. The code is outputted as an individual line depending on if that axis is activated. Locks were provided to ensure we can prevent any more motion on an axis if we don’t want to:
Transplanted
So I’m currently living with my friend Alex in Cambridge. He’s leaving in a few days to go to Brazil, but I think I’ve arranged a new spot to lay my head. I’m just starting a new job with a startup doing some Ruby/Rails programming, and I drive a moped around town. It’s beautiful:
Project based posting maybe be slow, but there’s some new programming snippets on their way here. Be good.
Yours in awesome
-BG
Goodbye 2008
What? So soon? We’re nearing the double digits for the 21st century. I’m nearing my own quarter of a century, I feel like I squandered it. I missed dozens of opportunities to attain mastery at different topics. But is mastery all that great? I’d like to know what you think is important? Because I can’t isolate it, every time I think I have the earth quakes beneith my feet and I wind up in another country of thought. So the closest thing to science in this regard is to take a poll, pshh psychology… Anyhow, what do you think is important?
-reading Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.
Bilal Ghalib
Controlling video games with your hands
Last semester for my 3D game programming class I was thinking about what I could do to continue my investigation on alternative forms of game play and I was thinking that it would be really neat to interact with a flying game naturally. To this day I stick my hands out the windows and feel the power of the wind rushing by. I remember pretending my hand was an airplane as my dad would drive down the highway.
Using that intuitive motion for control my partner Vamsi and I designed a video game that uses a 3 axis accelerometer and a serial interface to communicate to the Torque engine and made a game you controlled by moving your hand. All the code is found here. The Design Document describing the game play is found here.
Face Controlled Game – Escape From Tibet
Escape From Tibet (EFROT) was a 2d game designed with XNA that utilized an interesting method for control. The assignment was to create a 2D game, and I thought back to some of my early memories of fun games that I used to play in two dimensions. One that I remembered was Ski Free! Man, what a great game! While trying to reformulate this old classic for our new machines I was considering that human computer interaction has been the same for decades, I thought we would try to manipulate our game differently. I thought of a way we could use the webcams that are on all of our computers to make this game more accessible to all, so you move your player by simply moving your head to one side or another, and by doing some face detection and determining which quadrant of the screen you were in we could then move the skier as he travels down the slope. My partner Aaron Curly made a wrapper for openCV so we could use it in C# and helped me write this fun game. All the code we wrote is available here.
Laser Projector Construction
Construction is moving along. Here are a few updated pictures:
| From Laser Projector |
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| From Laser Projector |
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| From Laser Projector |
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| From Laser Projector |
So now I’m in the process of making the electronics for this project, the laser strength adjustment so the white light is white, and lastly the alignment. Hopefully not too much longer now. If only I wasn’t in school…
CLAI – Clay Animated Video Game – Cancerous Lump Aretaics Investigated
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This is a new game I developed for my game class winter 2008. I decided to shoot my own stop motion animation to make the game more appealing. The idea is that you are Mr. Moore a lump of flesh inside a human body who doesn’t know he’s a melanoma… A cancer… Suddenly a knife comes crashing down through the roof of his house and he narrowly escapes. You can’t trust anyone because even your closest allies turn against you. Throughout the game you realize that you are the problem, and that you have to kill yourself to win. Here’s a video of the animation:
The source code and images for the game can be found here: Clai Source Code
From Austin to Phoenix to Home
Hai-YA
That trip to the Austin Maker Faire was a tiny bit over my threshold for crazy. Still it was awesome to meet the people at Nublabs.org and well…aparently I’ll be going to Boston in 2 weeks Nov 1st.
There’s a possibility I wont be getting 3 degrees, but that’s fine. I have stuff to do that excites me more. And everyone wins when I get excited about something.
There’s a passion of Bilal kinda flowing right now and no cup to hold it. Not sure where to put this overflow.
-bg
Going to austin
If you’re in Austin and are going to the maker faire, please come and hang out with me at 4:30 on the Maker Stage. I’ll be presenting some new projects along with my old laser cutter.
-BG
iPod/TV Video Laser Projector – Proof of Concept
The idea came to me when I saw that microvision was coming out with some pico laser projectors that had some neat properties. First it was tiny and portable, second there were no lenses needed since it was a laser display and laser light doesn’t diffuse out as much as… well… diffuse light. Lastly and most importantly the aspect ratio could be changed indefinitely with the wall to be projected on. This means you could place the projector basically at 90o to the wall you want to project on! COOL! So I decieded I’d have to make one, the simplest way I could think of was to use RGB combined lasers and shine them through an LCD screen. Here are my first attempts:
That video shows the dismantling of the LCD screen and the first test of unfocused laser light as a transmitting light source. It seems to work.
I’m also using some Dichroic Mirrors / Beamsplitters from Thor labs to mix my red, green, and blue lasers to make white laser light. This will enable me to output full color laser video. The way the dichroic filter works is by selective reflection, this will allow laser mixing in the following manner:
I bought multiple mirrors, each one selectively reflects a narrow band of light. So when I want to combine red and blue I would use a cyan subtractive filter aim the red through it, but have the blue bounce off at the same angle the red went through. This will have the effect of spectral laser combining and the resulting laser light will not be coherent. For more methods of laser combination and an explanation check out The Encyclopedia of Laser Physics.
Here’s the album of photos that i have of this project… So far:
Burnout Ink – Eating T-shirts
During the silk screening class I teach last week I brought in my experimental burnout ink.
We attempted to burn out several different fabric and fiber types. Here are a few tips we picked up:
- Make sure to saturate the fabric when you print so the ink goes through the shirt.
- Burn it out to a light golden brown, not any darker or you’ll stain the fabric.
- Wash immediately with cold water.
- Print on a towel with plastic on top (A soft platen helps with ink penetration)
- Screen print the design a few times with a high angle and lots of pressure.
- 50/50 polyester cotton blend fabric shirts didn’t work very well.
- 25 rayon 25 cotton 50 polyester worked the best
For many more pictures and some photo’s of the process check my picasa album.
-instructable soon
Bilal
Sodium Metasulfite and Guar Gum – How to make burn out ink
A gift came in the mail today, I’m the proud parent of two new bags of cocaine looking powders: Guar Gum and Sodium Metabisulfate. These two chemical compounds carry some heavy weight and should be extremely handy for my next project. Burnout Ink Flamethower Tee Shirt! The shirt may or may not throw flames, but the idea takes the combined properties of the two chemicals I bought to selectively eat a shirt to create sheer transparent layering effects.
The Sodium Metabisulfate, which I’ll call the shirt eater, is a chemical commonly used in tree stump removal. You pour some on and it eats the organic fibers that compose the tree and you now have a boring lawn. But what this also means is that the cotton parts of a shirt might be eaten leaving the non-organic parts (the polyester).
Awesome, now we need a carrier. Let’s bring in contestant #2! Gaur Gum!
So now we have the active ingredient in our burnout ink we need something to transport it. Guar Gum is pretty neat stuff, it’s edible… actually it’s used as a binder in some medicines and it’s pretty non-reactive. This derivative of a bean is a perfect thickener, it’s a part of toothpaste and shampoo conditioner. It does not gel on it’s own, so wikipedia suggests borax, I’d like to see what kind of gel it turns into (perhaps this has a use in some casting applications as well?)
Soon we’ll give this a shot and a new design will be up at modati’s hack line of shirts. Home burnt shirts homeboys.
Yo
-BG
Ruin the Internet – Create Webshite
.jpg "Destroy the net")
Help me ruin the internet by creating the worst webpage in the history of the web. I’m calling it Webshite. I’ve been coming up with a list of ways we’ve taken a great idea like the internet and corrupted it along the way: disabling right clicking, and animated mouse cursors come to mind… I’d like your help! Go to ruintheweb.com and add your demented rubbish to the list!
Try to be creative because I will take your suggestions and turn ruintheweb.com into Webshite, the worlds most foul webpage.
Weblog Going live
I’ve needed a new blog for a while, a place to bounce my ideas off of a community of fans, friends, fiends and felons hoping to extract something resembling knowledge. So bilalghalib.com/does is live. I’m calling it does because rather than blather about banter, I plan on pelting you with projects. But alas I begin to bumble, let’s rumble.