TileToy go America

Finally, after few sleepless nights the toys are packed and I'm off to Washington DC for Sauma exhibition build-up and opening. I just finalised five more pic tiles and few games for demonstration there. I do my best blogging some bits from there.

The few games, alphabet, calculator and puzzle, were made with Max/MSP controlling four tiles. Kids liked them and with their attention span that's promising. Dan is working on stand-alone setup where we run the games from a dedicated "server" tile without a computer. First demo version of that will be shown at Sauma also. Check the video below on the puzzle game.

Puzzle game clip

UK week 2, part3

Time for Dan's magic. The first attempt for the server-client PIC boogie was so advanced that it was bit rich code for our circuit. The cure: change the minimal electronica radio stream to 80's greatest hits. The new Tears for Fears-mood downgraded the code to something that even PIC could understand. Now we had server-client network up and running.

The dodgy PIC code upload was a still pain in the 65 82 83 69 in ascii terms. It failed 9 times out of 10 until the 80's music was accidentally paused: The machine went ping, working perfectly. More logical conclusion than the-programmer-disliking-the-eighties was that the mp3 player sucked too much processor power leaving the programmer too little. After this Dan made a working reed switch detection loop in minutes. My flu was gone and the tiles were N SYNC. That's a wrap. Check the educational video below.

repeat after me

UK week 2, part2

After some serious headbanging and runny nose of soldering iron an my own things started to happen. Email to Easyradio guys and a reply that even designer could understand: "Try dropping the power to the module through a diode that drops say 0.7V to control the ripple." Me poke in a diode and the sky opened: Range increased about 1000%, out of the door, down the stairs and out to the Yorkshire valleys. One down, two to go.

Observe the old-reliable Stamp version in the pic above on the right, and the trimmed-down PIC version on the left. With the magic diode. Thanks again David Schmider from Low Power Radio Soulutions UK.

UK week 2, part1

The TileToy touring circus is back in good old H-field. Last rushes before the Sauma exhibition is the theme of this week. First thing was to double check that the PIC version works correctly before the ten unit mass production. First obstacle, nasty flu for me from the plane aircon bacteria buffet. Second obstacle, our tile-to-tile range was inches not meters. Topped with dodgy PIC code upload difficulties, we waz no 'appy.