Fugio Friday: 16th March 2018

Happy Fugio Friday!

I had a great time in Texas last week with the exhibition, giving lectures and workshops, eating steaks, driving around, and buying a very fetching pair of cowboy boots.

And this Saturday I’ll be showing my Oculus Rift based VR artwork ‘Sequence‘ made with Fugio at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.

There’s a new development update, which you can download here, that fixes a couple of issues that users have raised this week:

  • NEW: FFMPEG/Sound Effects example showing how to play single shot sounds
  • FIXED: Loop Count wasn’t working properly on Media Player
  • FIXED: Media Player audio playback needed a refresh
  • FIXED: Lua library installation fix for macOS

As the new functionality for 3.0.0 is pretty much there, I will be aiming to release it soon once I’ve done some more testing and fixed a couple of issues with the Firmata plugin.

Have a great weekend!

BLACK FUGDAY 2017

BLACK FRIDAY 2017

We have a special deal on Painting With Light easy video mapping software: 40% off until Sunday 26th!

Also, the new FFGL plugins for Resolume 6 are now available:

bigfug FFGL plugins for Resolume 6 on Windows

bigfug FFGL plugins for Resolume 6 on macOS

Finally, Fugio – my node based multimedia programming environment – continues to be free and open source, so no further discount is possible, however if you’re in a giving mood, donations are always welcome!

Happy Friday!

Fugio Friday: Ars Electronia Report

Happy Fugio Friday!

And for those of you who signed up to the mailing list at Ars Electronica: welcome!

For those who weren’t in Linz, we were showing off the latest Fugio build running various patches, including a native OpenGL ES on a Raspberry Pi 3.  There were also Fugio badges, stickers, and lots of interesting conversations!

 

There was a great deal of interest in the Raspberry Pi build, and several people suggested how it could be an excellent platform for educational programs, and cost effective too!

We also had several conversations on the topic of long term preservation of digital art, which is something I’ve built into the heart of Fugio since day one.

It was great to introduce people to Fugio in person and see their reactions and get their impressions of the software through fresh eyes.  It’s given me some good ideas for how I want to proceed in the future with new tutorials and features.

For now, I’m focussing on native audio and video playback on the Raspberry Pi as my next major task.  Will keep you posted…

As ever, please send me your ideas, feedback, and news of any Fugio projects that you’re working on, and have a great weekend!

Fugio Friday: Ars Electronica

Happy Fugio Friday!

It’s great to be back in Linz for Ars Electronica 2017.  Have already caught up with many friends from around the world and seen some lovely works, though the event is so huge that there is still so much to be seen.

In preparation for the Mini Maker Faire in POSTCITY on Sunday I have got Fugio badges and stickers ready to give away, so if you’re at Ars Electronica, do stop by and see Fugio in action.

My laptop is now 500% better with a shiny new Fugio sticker on it…

Will post up pictures from the event next week.

Have a great weekend!

Fugio Friday: Text Syntax Update

Happy Fugio Friday!

This week work has continued on doing fun things with Raspberry Pi’s!

One key thing I need to be able to do is control patches remotely.  While there are already plenty of options for sending and receiving pin data (see the updated Network plugin documentation), there is no possibility for using a text editor remotely while retaining syntax highlighting and error reporting, which are both very helpful when hacking shaders and scripts.

The dream being that I can have an editor on a laptop and remotely live code a shader on a Raspberry Pi.

So I’ve refactored the syntax highlighting and syntax error reporting system to facilitate sharing this information remotely.  Next up is writing a couple of nodes for sending and receiving this information over a network.

This should even work over the internet, which opens up some interesting remote collaborative options!

You’ll also notice in the image at the top, I’ve updated the Text Editor to show errors by highlighting the line numbers in red, which is a lot clearer.

I also enabled sending keyboard events from one Fugio to another, which should also prove useful in the future.

All the code changes are available in the GitHub repository.

I’ve cleaned up and organised the Core plugin documentation.  Still much to do, though I’m slowly working my way through it.

Finally, I wanted to highlight this new patch by Winfred Nak that he posted up in the Fugio Users Group on Facebook.  It’s a rather cool game show buzzer where the first button pressed will trigger off the music for that team.  It’s a good application of logic nodes, which are really useful!

Gameshow Buzzer by Winfred Nak

If one was so inclined, one could add a Firmata node and use an Arduino and real physical buttons as inputs…

Next week I’ll be setting up our robots as part of a new exhibition called Our Friends Electric at QUAD Derby.  The launch event is on Friday and I’ll be speaking at an event there on Saturday.  Come along and say hello!

Have a great weekend…

Fugio Friday: Virtual Reality Smells

Happy Fugio Friday!

We have a new forum for discussing Fugio ideas and issues. It’s a bit quiet so far so do post up your thoughts and questions!

This Sunday (May 7th) I’ll be taking part in the Imperial College Festival, showing our Fugio based virtual reality experience that explores whole genome sequencing of bacteria.  Come along and say hello.

This new version, previously shown at Oxford’s Museum of History of Science (pictured), features smells that are blown towards the participant via motors with 3D printed fans at points synchronised to the audio narrative; their speed controlled by a Fugio timeline sending serial messages to an Arduino with a motor shield.

In other news, I asked the Fugio Users Group whether they were running 32 bit or 64 bit Windows.  The results were 100% 64 bit!  Until now I’ve just been building Fugio on Windows as a 32 bit application, but I’d like to support 64 bit too, so I put the basics in place, and also looked at cmake as an alternative to finding different libraries, the results of which are all on GitHub.

I’ll be in Amsterdam next week, so you can look forward to a “Fugio vrijdag” update.

Fugio Friday – 3rd February 2017

Happy Fugio Friday!

This week I’ve not had much of a chance to work on Fugio as I’m preparing an artwork for the HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY exhibition that’s opening at the Science Gallery in Dublin next week.

The Anti-Social Swarm Robots don’t like each other, or the walls of the pen they are contained in, or people.  They are constantly trying to get away from everything to find their own ‘personal’ space.

When we first exhibited them at the Royal Academy in London, they were described by Sumit Paul-Choudhury, the editor in chief of New Scientist, as “Antisocial swarmbots. This is actually proper brilliant: biomimicry of a behaviour we don’t consider useful”.

There is an exhibition launch party on Feb 9th.  I’ll be there, as well as giving a short talk about the project on Feb 10th.

Finally, Shadows of Light, which is one of my Fugio powered artworks that was part of the Embodied Encounters exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology had a nice write up in a new article in the UCI Magazine.

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!