This weekend I managed to build my first web app from the ground up. It is shonky, it doesn’t do a lot, but I made it, from scratch.. Well, starting from the excellent HTML 5 Boilerplate and maybe with a few copy/pastes from Stack Overflow

View the app here: http://www.roowilliams.com/tag

It uses JavaScript, jQuery AJAX, PHP and and SQL queries to run. It posts the user submitted ‘tags’ into a database, then on the post’s complete callback it gets the most recent tag to display it in the page. I wasn’t sure if this was the best way to do it, and have not seen an example of this way (or any other way for that matter), but it kinda works.

I’ll catch up with the Dev’s at work and find out how to do it better.

I also made a few changes to this site’s layout this weekend; getting rid of a column, expanding the content area, adding a box shadow to the main content div and a random (of 7 possible), full bleed background image on the html element.

While I am talking about learning to code, this excellent video from Code.org:

I especially like what Zuckerberg says about learning>doing>learning>doing and building on something rudimentary to increase its capability.

I am enjoying the process of starting with something quite simple, and then coding in new functionality in a step by step process.

The unripe fruits of my labour can be seen online here. It isn’t mind-blowing, but hopefully the idea comes across.

http://www.roowilliams.com/bubblebox/

Why not give every home appliance a low-powered Bluetooth/WiFi module and do away with interfaces? Less tooling, less material variation, less quality control, interface design costs and more hygienic are among the many benefits that I can think of off the top of my head.

What happens if your smart-phone breaks/gets lost you ask? Well that could be problematic if it is your sole computing device, but do you know anyone without at least one computer in their house that couldn’t provide an interface to these devices?

This might not be the most desirable solution for older generations, but it is definitely time to start rolling out home appliances without interfaces. I’d buy them.

Samsung already have a smart washing machine, controllable via app. Hopefully we wont see too many more touch screens, and horrible designs like this bad boy:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/demoing-the-app-controlled-samsung-smart-washer-and-dryer/

A few cool things:

Valhalla from Sweetgrass Productions is a new snowboarding/ski film with a gorgeous aesthetic. The saturated, grainy imagery pushes the cross-processed trend far into psychedelia. Just by watching the trailer it seems the delivery is so rich and immersive, it causes me to feel a certain way.

It is amazing how far these films have progressed. No longer are we seeing rough edits shot by a camera man with one eye on the action and the other eye on where he’s going, these films are feature-length, sit down, grab some popcorn and have your mind blown, projector-worthy pieces of art.

This one courtesy of one of my favourite blogs, iso50.com

Designspiration.net is filled with bang-on visual trends as usual. Loving the emphasis on hand-drawn typography, truth to materials in interior design and minimal logotypes harking back to the days of old.

I am wondering if the emergence of this vintage, minimal aesthetic stems from a backlash to the ultra-slick, corporate design of web 2.0. Somehow it almost feels anti-corporate in its content, despite the following logotypes advertising businesses, the letterforms, and scratchyness hints at a time where companies were more human, honestly struggling along trying to make some money.

Visit http://typefornow.co.uk/simon-walker/ to see more examples like this.

If you gave a thought about how a the premises of business with this style of logo might look you’d be forgiven for expecting it to have a similar aesthetic to this:

There’s definitely an organic, human, minimal and vintage theme here. Furnishings, construction and objects that are honest and true to the materials used (as in not hidden or covered by some horrible plastic veneer.) Although this is actually probably someones home, it represents the same theme we are seeing within visual culture at the moment.

I like it.

Humans are equipped by nature with strong problem solving abilities, probably as a way of our genes ensuring we’ll be able to cope and thrive with whatever is on the other side of their understanding.

The problem with learning is that we are only ready to solve problems as we come up against them. We need to see limitations of what we already know before we can work to move past them.

Being taught something more advanced than your current level of understanding will often go in one ear and out the other, because you aren’t able to conceptualise a model of what is going on in your head; failing to imagine the problems that the methods being taught are trying to solve.

People often talk about how anyone can do anything by using Google these days. About how you can’t properly learn a language without being immersed in an environment where that language is spoken.

Learning by doing is definitely for the win, as these Ethiopian kids that firstly taught themselves English and later hacked Android with no prompting or help can attest.

I understand how brushed motors work having seen the inside of plenty during my days of ripping any electrical toy I had apart as a kid, but wanted to learn about how brushless motors work.

Standard DC electric motors contain two main parts: permanent magnets and electromagnets formed by a charged coil. It is the attract and repel of the electromagnets against the permanent magnets being switched at the correct point of the motors rotation that makes them spin. In brushed motors this is done mechanically. The terminals for the coils are placed around the shaft of the motor. This is the bit that spins, and it is called the armature. As the armature spins around, the brushes come into contact with each of the terminals. The positioning of these terminals allows the correct coil to charge creating a temporary electromagnet that pushes against the fixed permanent magnets, pushing the motor around.

In short, brushed motors spin the armature around inside a case with fixed, permanent magnets mounted around the outside of the casing. The brushes are needed to come into contact with the terminals, the switching is done mechanically.

Brushless motors do the opposite; the coils are fixed either to the outer casing or inside the casing while the magnets are spun. This means that the coils can’t be mechanically switched – there is no feedback about the motors position since there are no brushes in contact with the armature. This means that they have to be computer-controlled. The electromagnets have to charge in the correct order, and at the correct times, relative to the speed of the spinning armature. This is done by something called an electronic speed control or ESC.

I am still wondering about how it knows what pulses to send when – if there is a heavy load on the motor, then the motor is going to take longer to spin up, and so the pulses will fall out of sync without feedback. More reading to be done here.

There are also two different kinds of brushless motors:

Outrunner motors have the magnets mounted on the outer casing and the outer casing is spun around the fixed coils in the center of the motor casing, hence the term “Outrunner”.

Inrunner motors have the fixed coils mounted to the outer casing and the magnets are mounted to the armature shaft and this spins inside the casing, hence the term “Inrunner”.

This article and video explains in detail (once your ears adjust to dude’s accent), this forum post is particularly helpful and this eBay guide looks promising.

That briefly covers types of motors but they also have different power ratings that I need to get my head around. I need something that can generate enough lift to allow me to support all the sensors/cameras I plan to mount on it. There are formulas that allow for a good calculation of how much lift you can achieve, but that in itself will be another topic. TBC.

The intention is that by doing this project I will hone my making skills, electronic skills, learn about wireless technology, data collection and have built a fun, modular platform that can be controlled via software. I’m planning to strap a few ultrasound sensors to it and see if I can make it autonomous, as well as exploring whether it is possible to map an environment via feedback from these sensors. In future I can add a camera for FPV driving, GPS shield and hopefully an automated Nerf gun launcher. Excited!

Being a digital agency located on the bustling King’s Road, Chelsea, it would be silly for us not to create a platform like this for displaying work, creating interactive installations or simply welcoming people as below. The mirrored output is projected from the inside onto a window treated with frosting vinyl to create the display outside.

Unconventionally, instead of projecting onto a plane we have decided to project onto a curved window. This does make for some slight horizontal distortion, but because of the way the projector projects, we also get some arching of straight lines.

The way we overcome this is to counter-arch the output. As this was to be a static image I arched the text in Photoshop to correct it, and we ended up with something looking like this.

In other news, yesterday we started filming something I worked on for Lynx last week. Watch this space.

Breakout.js is a prototyping tool for exploring the intersection of the web and the physical world.

I had some fun (and some frustration) last night trying to get my head around breakout.js. Immense possibility here; the Arduino can be used as an output and also an input to a web page to create tangible interactions with websites.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The music is my ode to this music in this amazing video on using magnets to create physical/tangible interfaces for mobile devices.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.