Merry Christmas!

While we’re still wrapping the final presents at bigfug HQ, I wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and thank you for your kind support over the 12 months.

It’s been a full and exciting year (albeit with a few weird bumps along the road (am still sad about Bowie!)) and I’m looking forward to working on some great projects and releasing some very exciting features for Fugio and Painting With Light in 2017.

Do keep your comments, suggestions, and bug reports coming in.  They’re invaluable to helping me make the software even better.

Now, where are the mince pies…

Fugio Friday – 9th December 2016

 

Happy Fugio Friday (on a Saturday!)

My flight back from Tel Aviv developed a technical problem and we had to make an unscheduled stop in Athens, finally arriving back in the UK seven hours later than expected, hence the late post!

I’m happy to release an update to the Windows version of Fugio, bringing it up to speed with the macOS release from last week.

There was also a bug report about plugin loading under Windows that I’ve now fixed.

Updated your installation using the maintenance tool in the application directory, or download and install a fresh version:

Download Fugio 1.11.0 for Windows (7, 8, 8.1, 10)

Download Fugio 1.11.0 for macOS (OS X) (Mavericks 10.9+)

Fugio Friday – 28th October 2016

Happy Fugio Friday!

This week I’ve been hanging around the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, where my partner Anna has been doing a week residency with the scientists here. I’ve been exploring the nearby nature reserve, watching the squirrels and geese, and catching up with emails and threads of projects.

I’ve been looking at the way that Fugio is installed on OS X (now macOS), and I’m not entirely satisfied with the process that one has to go through, especially for the initial installation.  I’m experimenting with Homebrew casks, that facilitate installing applications such as Fugio through the same simple command line interface that Homebrew uses to install the libraries that we already use.

Packaging Fugio as a cask would mean installation would comprise of installing Homebrew, then typing “brew cask install fugio” into a Terminal to install the application and all its dependencies.  Much cleaner!  What do you think?

If I do go down this route, it will make releasing some new plugins somewhat easier…

On November 15th I’ll be giving a LASER talk (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendevous) at Westminster University in Harrow about my art practice and Fugio.  There’s no link for it yet but I’ll post it up when there is, if you fancy coming along and saying hello!

Have a good week, and as ever, let me know any questions and suggestions you may have.

Fugio Friday – 21st October 2016

Happy Fugio Friday!

This last week I went down to Cornwall for a meeting at Eden Project that I am one of several artists and many scientists who are were called on for some advice for a large project they’re working on.

It was also a great opportunity to check on the status of the interactive Fugio powered installation “The Human Super Organism” that I installed as part of their Invisible You permanent exhibition.

The Human Super Organism

Eden Project gets around one million visitors a year, so it’s an amazing opportunity to see how Fugio copes with that level of activity.  I’m happy to report, other than someone managing to steal the Leap Motion sensor (we’ve locked it down now!), the installation has run perfectly since it was installed, so I’m chuffed about that!

As well as giving a talk about my art practise and Fugio as part of Lewes Light last week, it’s been a busy week with no time for programming, so no Fugio updates this week.  I’m off to Cambridge next week and should have some time for something new…

Have a good week!

Alex

Fugio 1.9.0 – Leap Motion and XInput

Happy Fugio Friday!

I’m back from California, somewhat jetlagged, with two new Fugio plugins!

Download Fugio 1.9.0 for Windows and macOS (get the source code)

The Leap Motion controller picks up the positions of your hands in space. It’s supported on Windows and macOS. I used it for this Theremin inspired synthesizer patch:

The Leap Motion plugin doesn’t support finger positions yet – this will be added in a later update.

The XInput plugin brings the Microsoft XBox controller into Fugio (on Windows).  It supports four devices simultaneously.

Along with the compiled Kinect plugin from last week (again, Windows only) we have a new range of exciting input devices to play around with.

Obviously two of these plugins are Windows only, which is due to the fact that the hardware is built by Microsoft, but I have Kinect support for macOS coming too via OpenNI.

I’ll be speaking (in part) about Fugio at the Lewes Light festival conference today.

Next week I’m off to Cornwall for a couple of days as I’m on an advisory panel for something exciting at the amazing Eden Project.

NEW

  • Leap Motion plugin
  • XInput plugin
  • MatrixInverse and MatrixOrthographic nodes

UPDATED

  • New options in serial port configuration

FIXED

  • GL_INT_SAMPLER_2D had disappeared from ShaderCompiler
  • Rendering to depth textures
  • OpenGL command line option to open windows full screen

 

Fugio Friday – 7th October 2016

Happy Fugio Friday!

This week I’ve been in Los Angeles and Irvine.  The opening of the Embodied Encounters exhibition went really well, with Shadows of Light (my interactive, Fugio based installation) having lots of attention.

The exhibition is open until January 21st, 2017 at the Beall Center for Art and Technology.

Alex May with exhibition curators Simon Penny (left) and David Familian (center)
Alex May (right) with exhibition curators Simon Penny (left) and David Familian (center)

I gave a talk about Fugio and my art practise to students at USC Cinematic Arts:

And another talk to students at UCLA:

I’m back in England next week, teaching my new Digital Media Arts MA students at the University of Brighton, and giving another talk at the Lewes Light conference.

Fugio Friday – 30th September 2016

Happy Fugio Friday!

This week I’m in Irvine, California installing of my Fugio based artwork “Shadows of Light” at the Beall Center for Art + Technology.  The exhibition “Embodied Encounters” is open from October 1st 2016 to January 21st 2017 and features work by seven international contemporary artists.

There is an opening reception on Saturday, October 1st, 2-5pm – I’ll be there!

As I’ve been busy doing that, and the V&A show last weekend, there is no binary release this week, but there are some goodies to be had in the source code, if you’re compiling along at home:

  • NEW Kinect plugin (Kinect version 1 for Microsoft Windows only)
  • NEW MatrixInverse and MatrixOrthographic nodes
  • UPDATED Serial Port device configuration with many more options
  • FIXED rendering to OpenGL depth buffers
  • FIXED missing GL_INT_SAMPLER_2D support from ShaderCompiler
  • FIXED OpenGL command line option to make windows full screen

I’m not expecting to do a Fugio Friday next week as I’m taking a sort of holiday after the show opens, but I’ll be around to answer questions and such.

Fugio 1.8.0 – Serial port and Firmata plugins

Arduino Uno

Happy Fugio Friday!

Today we have two new plugins that enable Fugio to talk to hardware that uses a serial port interface, which includes the Arduino range of open source hardware (like the Arduino Uno above), which means that we can control LED lights, motors, servos, and use sensors for touch, magnetism, temperature, and many more!

The serial plugin handles the raw data communication between the Arduino and Fugio, and can be used to implement any kind of custom protocol between the two, but we can go one further and use the rather nice Firmata plugin to talk directly to the Arduino pins without writing any Arduino code at all.

Download Fugio 1.8.0 for Windows and OS X

Get the source code on GitHub

I haven’t had time to do a tutorial video (yet), but here’s some pointers to get you started:

Setting up a Serial Port

  • In the new Devices menu, choose Serial Ports
  • Add an entry for your Arduino.  Make sure you choose the right port, and set the baud rate (the speed the serial port will work at) to 57600 (bits per second)
  • Remember to press the Enable button for the entry you’ve just added

Arduino Serial Configuration

Reading from the Arduino (without Firmata)

Upload the following code to your Arduino:

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin( 57600 );
  
  while( !Serial )
  {
    // wait for serial port to connect.
  }
}

void loop()
{
  Serial.println( "Hello, World!" );
  
  delay(1000);              // wait for a second
}

Create the following:

Fugio reading from Arduino

And use the following Lua program:

fugio = require "fugio"

PinInputStrings = fugio.input( "Strings" )

function main()
	local Strings = PinInputStrings:get()

	for i = 1,#Strings do
		fugio.log( i .. ": " .. Strings[ i ] )
	end
end

Setting up Firmata

Instructable for installing Firmata on Arduino

And here’s what you have to do in Fugio:

Quit the Arduino software and load Fugio:

  • Add a Serial Input node, a Firmata node, and a Serial Output node
  • Connect the Serial input and Serial output to the Firmata node
  • Connect a button to the Reset pin

Firmata setup

If everything is connected and configured properly, you should see the pins appearing on the Firmata node.  Check the logger window for additional messages.

Firmata with pins

If this doesn’t happen first time, you may need to close the patch and reload it.

At this point you should be able to read and write to the Arduino pins!

Click the Edit Pins button to configure pins for inputs (digital INPUT (true/false) and ANALOG input (0-1023)), and outputs (digital OUTPUT (true/false), and PWM mode is supported):

Firmata pins

I’m going to be showing a couple of artworks at the prestigious V&A Museum in London for the next few days with the High Altitude Bioprospecting team (and fellow members of the Institute of Unnecessary Research) for the Digital Design Weekend as part of the London Design Festival.

23rd September: 6-8pm
24th and 25th September: 10:30am-5pm

I’ll have Fugio on hand (creating music from genomic data) so come and say hello!