Studio Notes 2-23-23

the node app I made to check the grotto api and send mqtt (mosquitto) messages to things like lights and the doorknob controller is working, which is huge.

studio notes 2-22-23

Genealogy breakthrough today- was able to fix a wrong name and add one generation prior to the earliest Fridel family member on record as well as a few additional people in other families. This means another version of the GEDCOM file, which is kind of a hassle at this point, because a new GEDCOM file totally rebuilds the game maze and I need to make sure that the cenotaph activation and relic csv’s all have all correct person names.

studio notes 2-16-23

Some changes to Grotto from Saturday that I’m just now documenting here- Added the body parts UI area and changed the item interaction pattern- body part items can be equipped, all items in either section have a ‘x’ button that will drop them in the current room.

studio notes 2-7-23

The cheapo usb 5.1 audio interface I got only does surround sound through a bunch of 3.5 mm analog plugs, and the surround speakers at the lab are digital only (the interface has optical out but it only carries stereo).

Multi-tasking with CircuitPython

For many of us, the first program we see or run on a new platform is some variation of “Blink” to turn an LED on and off at some rate. It has become like the “Hello World” of microcontroller programming. This will turn the LED on and then wait, or in other words, time. […] Link

How Police Actually Cracked the Idaho Killings Case

Around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, a masked man broke into a house about a mile from the University of Idaho campus and stabbed four students. Then he walked past a stunned, surviving roommate and left. […] Link

studio notes 2-3-23

My current challenge is to find ways to connect Grotto to a gallery space for my final show. I’d like to avoid falling into the same pattern of “Thing projected on a wall” that you see at a lot of these shows. So far I have been concentrating on esp32 microcontrollers or headless raspberry pi’s that can get information from Grotto’s API. I’d like to use lights and sounds and weird tactile interfaces as much as possible.

Grotto 0.10.0 - Grottopaint

First big push to the staging server in 2023- 0.10.0 includes the first iteration of a graphics window for room maps and animations, using a combo of pixi.js, svelte-pixi, Tiled.app, and a new tiled-compatible version of what was previously called scratchbeam, that I am now calling grotto-paint.

BABBDI

The only way out of the vast, brutalist city of BABBDI is by train – if you can get hold of a ticket. Exploring Babbdi is a delight. It pulls off this amazing feat of feeling like a tightly designed videogame, but at the same time, like a real place that doesn’t care that you’re there. […] Link

Phantom Homeland

This is project start for Phantom Homeland, an art installation.