TileToy

Setting up Sauma show in L.A.

2007-06-29T01:24:00.000Z

Sauma exhibition where TileToy is exhibited is opening at Architecture and Design Museum of Los Angeles on Friday 29th of June.

TileToy at Los Angeles

2007-06-14T12:51:00.001Z

Sauma exhibition opens at Architecture and Design museum at Los Angeles June 29th 2007. See TileToy there until the end of August.

A+D museum website

Futuresonic 2006, Manchester

2006-07-27T11:00:00.000Z

Not exactly TileToy related, but close enough. We run a Physical Computing workshop with Dan as a part of a series of workshops, organised by Derek Hales and our research posse from Digital Research Unit at Huddersfield University at the Futuresonic festival in Manchester.

High five for Derek, Sharon and fellow colleagues for hot and action packed week in Manchester.

We do love technology

2006-07-27T10:44:00.000Z

Late posting from UK this summer. Lisa Roberts and Abby Dix from Blink pulled together nice and sunny event in Huddersfield couple of weeks ago titled We Love Technology. We presented TileToy with Dan shortly and met lot of nice people, like Regine from we-make-money-not-art and the Troika duo and enjoyed inspiring talks by Matt Locke and Matt Webb.

Thanks again for Lisa and Abby for a lovely event.

Sauma show at NYC

2006-06-26T06:02:00.000Z

Sauma show at WFC is now up and running. It's a loooong show, until 10th of September, so go and check it out if in NYC. Hours, Tue-Fri 12-6pm, Sat-Sun 11-4pm. Directions here.

TileToy at NYC, building Sauma show

2006-06-17T16:16:00.000Z

Building the Sauma exhibition in World Financial Center Courtyard Gallery in New York city. Hot summer, mellow aircon, and even the dudes in the sushi bar below show the world cup footie, hurrah.

WFC page

Printed board process

2006-06-08T09:06:00.000Z

Apologies for the break in postings. Busy spring. The quest for our first own PCB has progressed a bit. We have now the very-first-not-sainty-checked version and we are waiting some feedback on it. If you happen to be a pro in PCB design and you don't mind checking our schematic and board lay-out, please contact us.

TileToy action coming to New York and Manchester. More on that soon.

TileToy in Pixelache, Helsinki

2006-03-31T12:25:00.000Z

Today we presented TileToy in Pixelache festival in Helsinki as a part of "Open Hardware / Products" presentations. Again, interesting issues were raised on openness of hardware when (commercial)manufacturing of the components is always there before we have Star Trek replicators around. Open architecture is probably more accurate term for releasing the plans and guidelines for making physical things.

Ville's instant video blog

TileToy in Tokyo

2006-02-24T05:27:00.000Z

TileToy was presented yesterday in the Japan Media Arts Festival. Lot's of people, lot's of enthusiasm. We-likee-Japan-vedi-much. Big thanks for Yuko for all the help!

USB radio driver for OSX

2006-02-03T13:27:00.000Z

The active-robots USB radio dongle was not listed in supported devices in FTDI driver package and I mailed the chip manufacturer FTDI just in case if it some day might be. Before I know it, FTDI support sent me a driver supporting the dongle! Holy helpdesk Batman, that's what I call support! Seriously, I expected some reaction by 2008 if few thousand people ask it.

The outcome: TileToy runs nicely now with the USB dongle without overpriced Keyspan and additional power. Me happy.

Version 1.0

2006-01-21T13:16:00.000Z

Our new website is now live at www.tiletoy.org and it has everything you need to know to make your own tiles and start coding your own games and demos with them. We're still going to update this blog but all code and technical info will be released via the website. It's soldering time.

Japan Media Arts Award

2005-12-22T10:01:00.000Z

TileToy was awarded a "Jury Recommended Works" -award in Entertainment category in Japan Media Arts Festival. We are in same level as Game Boy Micro but Nintendogs kicked our ass, whoo-ee. The Festival itself is in February.

Jury Recommended awardees
Scroll down to Entertainment category.

TileToy workshop, day4

2005-11-24T19:06:00.000Z

The last day and mostly Max/Msp/Jitter patching. Some super minimal VJ'ing on tiles, some sound controlled volume bars on them and some PicBasic tutorials form Dan. Rob gave nice introduction for the girls on physical computing in general, thanks Rob for that. Apart from lagging on schedule due to heavy debugging, we feel happy for the past days.

High-five for participants for bravery, apologies for sweat and tears. Send us more images if you got them. First TileToy workshop signing out. To the pub.

TileToy workshop, day3

2005-11-24T18:40:00.000Z

Second day, debugging. And debugging we did, oh yes. Lee got first the momentary lapse of joy with a working tile, hence the smile. Also some MAX patching action below from Jaygo and Samantha. A set of tiles in the late hours and Fiddian and Dan around our busy pic corner. Nearly there.

Tiletoy workshop, day2

2005-11-23T08:33:00.000Z

Six hours of concentrated soldering and lights started to blink on screens. Excellent work from everyone, definitely not the easiest kit for the first soldering job. Thanks Lee and Rob for photos.

Tiletoy workshop, day1

2005-11-22T00:05:00.000Z

Our first workshop and people showed up! And quite a interesting bunch of people I must say. The first day was just a brief introduction on the workshop, mainly chatting on who we all are and what we are aiming to do in the next couple of days. Tomorrow is the serious soldering session. Burn Huddersfield, burn.

Thank you Rob for the photo.

TileToy DIY workshop

2005-11-08T17:15:00.000Z

The first opportunity to make your own tiles is here. TileToy workshop takes place in Huddersfield UK, from Monday 21st to Thursday 24th as a part of Ultrasound festival.

See the workshop description here. Check also the rest of the festival program and be there with us.

TileToy @ Ultrasound

2005-10-30T07:49:00.000Z

TileToy can be seen in Ultrsound festival in Huddersfield UK end of November. We are giving a workshop on building tiles and programming games there. Check the Ultrasound website for program details.

Tiletoy Independence

2005-10-14T17:00:00.000Z

This might just look like yet another post involving Tiletoys and triangles. But these triangles are different. Instead of being controlled by a computer the tile displaying the number of active connections is now acting as the server. It processes the data received from the tiles and tells them what do display. Which in this case happens to be more triangles. I promise something more interesting than triangles next time. But for now check out the video below for more triangular goodness.

Connections video

Washington, opening

2005-10-10T15:27:00.000Z

Opening was a success. Over 200 visitors and people cueing in on saturday when The Washington Post published an article on Sauma. Now back in Finland, jet-lagged, but happy.

Washington Post article

Washington, day before opening

2005-10-05T23:27:00.000Z

Sauma exhibition is up. Short clip from TileToy stand below. Some opening action tomorrow.

Sauma clip

Washington, Day n?

2005-10-04T20:28:00.000Z

After undefined number of long days the exhibition starts to emerge from a heap of packaging garbage. Tiles are still working, some delay in radio, probably due to the massive espionage, counter-espionage and jamming of counter-espionage signals in the embassy neighbourhood. I'm waiting for stealth messages to appear on the tiles like: "Cool tiles dude, yours, CIA".

Washington, Day1

2005-10-02T22:08:00.000Z

The first day of setting up Sauma exhibition in the gallery space of Finnish Embassy in Washingon DC. All tiles survived the trip to here and the demo set is already bolted on the table top. Looking good. October in DC is like hot summer in Finland which calls for some barbeque action tonight.

TileToy go America

2005-09-30T21:00:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T19:27:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T19:12:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T18:56:00.000Z

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.

Images

2005-08-19T12:16:00.000Z

Set of new TileToy pics in Flickr:
show me, show me

Sauma tiles

2005-08-18T16:01:00.000Z

Final set of demo tiles ready for Sauma shipping. Check the animation below. I've been watching them all night. I feel funny. I don't see the sequence any more, I see the matrix.

final sequence

Hub

2005-08-18T09:50:00.000Z

Turning a broken hub to a synchronous serial controller. The hub is routing power, load, clock and data to all connected tiles via ethernet cable. The hub was gutted apart from the ports and regulator circuit. One added stamp is driving the display data to all individual tiles. This was done for Sauma exhibition demo-mode only where we have set of six tiles fastened to a tabletop and in this case wired to this hub. The playable tiles are naturally as wireless as always.

Control

2005-08-09T07:33:00.000Z

Demo tiles singing in sync & harmony

Six displays, one stamp

2005-08-06T08:49:00.000Z

Driving six displays from one stamp worked, which makes the demo mode somewhat simpler. Synchronous serial bitshift with common clock and load pins for all of them which leaves up to 14 independent data lines for displays. Massive.

Even these display same stuff, they have independent data lines, honestly
six display sync funk

Demo mode

2005-08-04T22:22:00.000Z

Dan is back in Finland for getting our tiles ready for Sauma exhibition shipping. Before finalising the first games and potentilly the first pic prototypes we're making a few standalone demos for the exhibition tiles. Knock yourself out with some old school pixel animation below:

Four tiles animation

ICSP rocks the board!

2005-07-02T09:26:00.000Z

I just found a socket on my Welleman K8048 pic programmer for in-circuit programming. Which means I don't have to swap the pic chip back and forth between the programmer and our circuit but I can upload the code directly to it. No news to you who know these things but a world domination type of realization for me. Now I can solder the chip on the board already in this prototype phase, unreal! How easy it is to keep a nerd happy. Please tell me if there is other must thingies with pics.

Hi, I'm pic and this is my space invader

2005-06-29T21:38:00.000Z

A frustrating week to get my PIC 16F628A work outside the programmer without external crystal. It finally worked. I got it to blink a led. That should have been like three minutes. After that I was quite prepared to debug every little detail one by one from stamp setup to pic setup. However, just out of curiosity I copied the matrix bit of the code and pasted it into picbasic, changed the pin names and it worked! So the part that was supposed to take the week was done in three minutes.

Back in Finland

2005-06-06T07:20:00.000Z

Back in Finland from very productive week in UK. I take this opportunity to thank again Dan and Lisa for their generous hospitality and Tom & Toby from The Media Centre and Derek from The University of Huddersfield for their support for TileToy project.

UK week, part 4

2005-06-02T17:31:00.000Z

It's been a good day, apart from my Marines getting their ass kicked in Space Hulk. Four tiles! We are getting there. Dan made a quantum leap in detecting actual connections in the Java side and started programming the first app. If we are lucky, we might have some 8bit eye-candy tomorrow.

UK week, part 3

2005-06-01T12:12:00.000Z

Promising speed with three tiles. Currently just detecting connecting sides, nothing else. We are approaching the milestone to start design the real games/plays though. Few good ones on paper already. Stay tuned, check the clip below.

ménage à trois:
tiletoy_play2

UK week, part 2

2005-05-31T16:33:00.000Z

"Ground control to Tile_one, any changes in your side sensors? over"
"Tile-one to GC, now when you asked, there is indeed someone in my side_02, over"
"Roger that Tile_one, forwarding the survey, over"
"Ground control to Tile_two, post your side sensor read-out, over"
"Tile-two to GC, bogie on my side_04, over"
"Ground control to Tile-one it's Tile_two, display following data on the screen, over" (sound of serial burst) "
"Roger that GC, over"
"Ground control to Tile-two, it's just Tile_one, display following data on the screen, over" (sound of serial burst) "
"Ten-four GC, over"
"Ground control to all tiles, do da loop", over & out (damn the tiles are dumb)

Check out the clip below:
tiletoy_play1

UK week, part 1

2005-05-30T16:31:00.000Z

It's my turn for travelling with TileToy and now back in Huddersfield, UK for 10 days with soldering and coding madness. After few days of frustration and smoking gluegun and burning soldering iron our new, plastic-packaged reed switches are in place as shown above in the most dirty circuit board ever. However, it has started to show some signs of reliability. Dan's Java code is currently smoking the living daylights out of the poor little PBasic in terms of speed, so switching to pics is apparent. Sorry about that Stamp.

17h uptime!

2005-05-25T08:09:00.000Z

A modest 800% improvement for the previous 2h uptime with 4* AA batteries. I did not realize even it's quite clearly stated in the package that the 9v battery is ~160mAh and AA battery is up to 2000mAh! I was probably the last one to figure this out. Apparently the 9v battery is only ok for one remote control IR LED and giving nice shocks to your tongue. Where are the lighter-sized cold fusion fuel cells. Industry, please respond, it can't be that difficult. You are just protecting your oil shares.

FIN week, part 2

2005-04-15T15:07:00.000Z

The prototype boards were fitted inside plastic cases with nice'n'retro dark red perspex

Being hand made with considerable amount of blue-tac the result was not bad at all. In fact we were so happy that we went outside for the first time in three days and showed our little space invader some wonders of the real world. He was so amazed that he just sat there.

Chip & Dale

FIN week, part 1

2005-04-14T19:02:00.000Z

Dan is in Finland for an intensive TileToy workshoppin' and the Pixelache festival. After 72 hours of non-stop soldering, stamp & java coding and trippin' in magnetic fields we have a pretty solid prototype circuit including reed switches and tilt sensor with first version of Java code that handles the whole thing.

The radio/stamp/switch circuit attachs directly below the LED matrix module so nicely that it looks like factory made by late 70's Hong Kong grade-D standards.

neighborghood watch

2005-03-09T23:50:00.000Z

This scary setup is a quite working test for detecting a connecting tile through plastic case. Reed switches connect when magnet in the other tile is aligned next to it and both tiles sends this connection information which tile / which side via rf. Next thing is to keep up with this changing connection data in the program side and use it for game play. How, remains top secret until we figure out remotely plausible explanation to entertain our investors.

Taking this to hand luggage might win us a complimentary strip search.

Double vision

2005-02-22T17:38:00.000Z

Just managed to get the control software to update two tiles at once. The RF/serial side of the software is coming together now. There's still no error checking at the moment though. So I'm not sure how the tiles would cope with interference. I bet they wouldn't like it to much though. Sorry for the blurry image. I'll take a better one tomorrow and add a video of the two tiles animating.

Custom matrix

2005-02-10T16:53:00.000Z

Self-made 8*8 matrix from standard red LED's. Soldering this was easier than I expected but I don't mind if someone points us the place to by them. All the ready-made matrixes has the plastic housing which really takes the thing out of these red beauties. One step closer to the real boxed prototype anyway.

Respect

2005-02-10T15:12:00.000Z

Time to pay some respects for the designs of glorious 70's and 80's electronic game design. Browse the "Electronic Plastic" -bible online here. The handhelden.com site itself is an impressive collection of these objects of desire.

Visuals

2005-02-09T11:34:00.000Z

Some modeling for the prototype. Here we used square LEDs,
the original round red one probably our favorite though.

Pixels in the air

2004-12-17T05:56:00.000Z

Some soothing success in serial radio communication. Our nice ready-made radio telemetry dongles work smoothly with the led matrix prototype. Now the display data is coming from the computer wirelessly in 9-byte bursts, the id and 8 bytes of the 8*8 matrix data. We can send quick cycles of unique data to be recognized and displayed by individual modules accordingly. Wireless link is reliable at least through a couple of walls.

Here the patterns are sent from Max/MSP in about one second cycles. The scrolling of the pattern is made in the Stamp. We are currently looking in to a Java "game engine" driving directly the set of modules or tiles as they will be.

Sending patterns manually:
changing matrix

Drawing the image and moving around with the module:
walking with matrix

Entering eighties

2004-12-08T01:45:00.000Z

I'm approaching the technological knowledge where the rest of the world was 30 years ago. Keeping this pace I'll be able to create answering machine by year 2034. But self-made is always more precious. So I have been lied to.

nuke some popcorn and enjoy following feature films:
clip: chatman
clip: night chevron
clip: T.O.Y. the trilogy

SHIFTOUT Dpin, Clock, MSBFIRST, [d7219]

2004-12-07T23:54:00.000Z

Finally received my 8*8 matrix chip integrated with the max7219 driver. After desperate bit-register shifting, which still is more black magic than science to me and after poking some pull-down resistors here and there, few boots, some very descriptive swearwords in finnish and I managed to get the space-invader to flicker on the screen before being killed by my most annoying self-shifting bit-register.

Cascadable 8 by 8 Dot Matrix LED