Month: April 2015

Here is a member of staff at Miners Court trying some tangible weave coding in the midst of our crafts area – at the moment it’s simply displaying the weave structure on the simulated warp weighed loom with a single colour each for warp and weft threads, the next thing is to get ‘colour & weave’ patterns working.

The pattern matrix is the second generation of tangible programming device from the weavecoding project. It’s been built as an open hardware project in collaboration with Falmouth University’s Makernow fablab, who have designed and built the chassis using many 3D printed parts and assembled the electronics using surface mount components (far beyond my stripboard skills).

Here you can see the aluminium framework supporting the AVR based row controller boards with the Raspberry Pi in the corner. The hall effect sensors detect magnetic fields – this picture was taken before any of the wiring was started.

The row controllers are designed to read the sensor data and dispatch it to the Raspberry Pi using i2c serial communication running on their atmega328 processors. This design was arrived at after the experience of building flotsam which centralised all of the logic in the Raspberry Pi, resulting in lots of wiring required to collect the 128 bits of information and pass it to the GPIO port on the Pi. Using i2c has the advantage that you only need two wires to communicate everything, processing can be distributed and it can be far more modular and extendible in future. In fact we plan to try different sensors and configurations – so this is a great platform for experimenting with tangible programming.

This video shows the current operation of the sensors and row controllers, I’ve programmed the board with test code that displays the state of the magnetic field with the status LED, making sure that it can tell the orientation of the programming block:

The row controllers have a set of multiplexers that allow you to choose between 20 sensor inputs all routed to an analogue pin on the AVR. We’re just using digital here, but it means we can try totally different combinations of sensors without changing the rest of the hardware.

After getting the first couple of rows working and testing it with elderly people at our Miners Court residency there were a couple of issues. Firstly the magnets were really strong, and I worried about leaving it unattended with the programming blocks snapping together so violently (as we plan to use it in museum settings as well as at Miners Court). The other problem was that even with strong magnets, the placement of the blocks needed to be very precise. This is probably to do with the shape of the magnets, and the fact that the fields bend around them and reverse quite short distances from their edges.

To fix these bugs it was a fairly simple matter to take the blocks apart, remove 2 of the 3 magnets and add some rings to guide placement over the sensors properly:

Our work on weavecoding is now reaching out to other uses and projects. One is Future Thinking for Social Living, run by Magda Tyżlik-Carver and Fiona Hackney.

This research project aims to look at the relationship between wellbeing, home, making and technology and is centred on Miners Court, who provide assisted housing in Redruth in Cornwall. As well as a range of flats and accommodation, the residents have shared communal areas with a variety of activities throughout the week. Along with Christiane Berghoff, Robin Hawes and Lucie Hernandez we set up camp with a lot of materials for knitting, crochet and weaving as well as some Raspberry Pis and the all new pattern matrix tangible weavecoding device.

The Future Thinking for Social Living project is set up to research how we can think more critically about home and community, and with particular focus on the future. From discussions with the staff at Miners Court – specific issues they are interested in are how to make better use of communal spaces, and how can they get more men involved with crafts and shared activities.

I’m also interested in how we can use these settings for artists residencies – how does working with people like this affect a design process, does working in such a place – and using it as way to start conversations (rather than being too much in ‘teacher mode’) affect the people living there positively? Also the weavecoding project provides some ideas in bridging gaps, both between technology and people – but also across gender gaps, mixing textiles with electronics for example.

Here is the new magnetic pattern matrix, running the 3D Raspberry Pi warp weighted loom simulation (more on this soon!) with a nice 4 shaft loom in the background.

On Monday and Tuesday we spent a long time talking, weaving, knitting and making cups of tea of course (and a bit of time debugging magnets on my part). I’ve found helping people weave with tablets on the inkle loom is a good way to get talking, as this seems new to even people who are experienced with crafts. It also appeals to people with mathematics or design background who normally are uninterested in knitting and other crafts, and seems gender neutral perhaps for the same reasons. It also helps to talk about the history of what we are weaving with, the fact that this is an ancient technique and yet there are so many surprises – I can’t really predict to them what will happen e.g. to the pattern when we change rotation direction, and this seems to be important.

What we have yet to do (but a few weeks to experiment yet) is bridge the technology gap. Many of them have an immediate reaction of distaste to computers, as most of them have them but report that they have become unusable or feel that they are not designed well with their needs in mind. Partly the situation of having some circuit boards getting tangled up in the more familiar materials and using the Raspberry Pi simulation to show what is happening on the loom next to it is a start. One interesting thing is that neither the Pi nor the AVR boards look enough like ‘a computer’ for it to stand out too much (which also part of the Pi’s role in the classroom) – this was more so after plugging it into their large TV and getting rid of the monitor. As it gradually gets into a working state, I’d like to first try using it to demonstrate well known weaves – e.g. plain, twill and satin.

Working in this environment on the pattern matrix between weaving with different people has already had an effect on it’s design process. One initial observation resulted in reducing the magnet strength – I hadn’t even considered before that having them snap together too forcefully would be a problem for some people. Such things are obvious in these kinds of settings.

Midway through the weavecoding project and our researches have thrown up a whole load of topics that either don’t quite fit into our framework, or we simply won’t have time to pursue properly. Here are some of the tangents I’ve collected so far.

Coding with knots: Khipu

One of the cultures I’m increasingly interested in are the Incas. Their empire flourished to up to 37 million people, without the need of money or a written language. We know that some numeric information was stored using Khipu, a knot based recording system which was used in combination with black and white stones to read and calculate. Two thirds of the quipus we have are un-translated, and do not fit into the known numeric coding system – what information do they hold?

Harvard University provides a Khipu Database Project with many surviving examples documented – I’m hoping to run a workshop soon to look through some of this data in a variety of ways.

Tablet weaving NAND gates

Diagram thanks to Phiala’s String Page – the only place I’ve seen tablet weaving explained properly.

There are logic gates in tablet weaving logic. I haven’t fully figured this out yet, but I noticed modelling tablet weaving that you end up basically mapping the combinations of the weaving actions (such as turn direction) and colour as truth tables.

Top face colour based on top left/top right hole yarn in a single card and turn direction (clockwise/counter clockwise)

TL Yarn : TR Yarn : Turn : Top face colour
--------------------------------------------
Black   : Black   : CCW  : Black
Black   : Black   : CW   : Black
Black   : White   : CCW  : Black
Black   : White   : CW   : White
White   : Black   : CCW  : White
White   : Black   : CW   : Black
White   : White   : CCW  : White
White   : White   : CW   : White

Things get stranger when you include twist and combinations of actions with multiple cards. Would it be possible to compile high level programming languages into weaving instructions for carrying out computation? Perhaps this is what the untranslatable quipus are about?

Nintendo made a knitting machine

We could really do with some of these, unfortunately they never went beyond prototype stage.

Asemic writing

Asemic writing is a post-literate written form with no semantic content. Miles Visman programs procedural asemic languages and hand weaves them. I think this may be an important connection to livecoding at some point.