sundh.com

Depressed shoe shelf in action

Ellen — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:09:04 +0000

The depressed shoe shelf from Ellen Sundh on Vimeo.

Your pulse as an input

Ellen — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:26:10 +0000

Maria Paz is exploring the field of mood inputs by using your pulse as an input to control your environment. The sensor is sending out light that is reflected in the finger and back to the light sensitive sensor. As blood is pumping and flowing in the finger the amount of light received back alters. The output gives you the pulse of your body. Follow her progress in working on her final project Mood Tunnel on http://themoodtunnel.posterous.com/

Nintendo Wii introduced the Vitality sensor a few months ago, working as an input to measure your health and can be used in games.

LEDs translating human pulse from Maria Paz on Vimeo.

Share on Facebook

Hyper Island – Tech session

Ellen — Sun, 02 May 2010 14:04:01 +0000

Last week I visited Hyper Island in Karlskrona to have a workshop with the tech students. They are focusing on different technologies and explore the step of reaching their technical solution. There were some ambitious ideas and I helped them in the right directions. Some of the technologies explored were Arduino integreation with ping sensors and using the Wii remote as an input to control a game in Flash. The findings will be presented for all to see.

The tech students are also bizi working on their class site launching at the 15th of May. Stay tuned at http://whatisxv.com/. Use the hashtag #THEXV to get access to the site.

Share on Facebook

Embedding fonts with code

Ellen — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:29:43 +0000

Embedding your fonts by code, you enter this code into an fla:

[Embed( systemFont="Arial", fontName="arialBold" , fontWeight= "bold" ,

mimeType="application/x-font", unicodeRange="U+0020-U+007E,U+00A1-U+00FF,U+2000-U+206F,U+20A0-U+20CF,U+2100-U+2183,U+0100-U+01FF, U+1E00-U+1EFF;")]

var arialBold:Class;

Font.registerFont(arialBold);

Export your fla preferably with the name of the font and load it into you Flash application. “arialBold” is the identifier used in your classes after loading in your font swf. When you add your font properties to your text field the following code is used:

var textField:TextField = new TextField();

textField.embedFonts = true;

var textFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat();

textFormat.font = "arialBold";

textFormat.bold = true;

textFormat.color = 0×000000;

textFormat.size = 12;

textField.selectable = false;

textField.width = 300;

textField.multiline = true;

textField.wordWrap = true;

textField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;

textField.defaultTextFormat = textFormat;

textField.text = "Your text here";

To get the specific unicode range for your project you can input your characters and convert them with the help of the Unicode range tool.

These are the most common unicode ranges I use:

//Basic Latin

//Characters: !"#$%&’()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

U+20-U+7E

//Latin-1 Supplement

//Characters:  ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿ

U+20,U+A1-U+FF

//Latin Extended-A

//Characters: ĀāĂăĄąĆćĈĉĊċČčĎďĐđĒēĔĕĖėĘęĚěĜĝĞğĠġĢģĤĥĦħĨĩĪīĬĭĮįİıĲĳĴĵĶķĸĹĺĻļĽľĿŀŁłŃ

//ńŅņŇňŉŊŋŌōŎŏŐőŒœŔŕŖŗŘřŚśŜŝŞşŠšŢţŤťŦŧŨũŪūŬŭŮůŰűŲųŴŵŶŷŸŹźŻżŽžſ

U+100-U+17F

Share on Facebook

Building your own humidity sensor in 2 minutes

Ellen — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:22:02 +0000

I am working on a project where I need to measure the humidity of the space. I want to know when the space has dried up and when it is wet or soaking wet. There are several different humidity sensors on the market but t does not absorb water but only measure the level of humidity around it. They are small and does not attract water. So I tried to build my own DIY version and my first attempt works quite well. Check it out:

Share on Facebook

Sharp GP2Y0D810Z0F IR Sensor

Ellen — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:23:54 +0000

Trying out the small Sharp GP2Y0D810Z0F IR sensor. It only detects when an object is 2 cm to 10 cm away. Great for detecting close up objects. The sensor is very sensitive so I added a resistor of 1 mega ohm to lighten up the power supply. There are 3 pins on the circuit board of the sensor: ground, power supply (2.7 V to 6.2 V) and analog output. More details on the sensor and circuit board on Pololu’s site who are the manufacturers of the circuit board. There is also another version of this sensor Sharp GP2Y0D805Z0F, detecting objects even closer with a range of 0.5 cm to 5 cm.

Serial monitor output

Share on Facebook

Modern outhouse

Ellen — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:37:18 +0000

Outhouse wintertime

You can now read the full story behind the modern outhouse that I build a couple of years ago. Later on I added a solar-cell unit on the roof to power up the lighting inside of the outhouse during night-time. Images of this unit and the lighting will be uploaded to the article soon.

Share on Facebook

Detecting infrared light

Ellen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:19:29 +0000

Magic Mirror Infrared detector

Building robotics and electronic installations with IR sensors can be a hassle when detecting objects. At the moment I am working with several Sharp IR sensor that I suspect interfere with each other, picking up each others bounce light. I saw this need neat little IR detection card that displays your IR light so you know exactly where your IR sensor bounce back on objects.

Investigating these cards further I found out you can use a digital camera to catch the light. The human eye can’t see the IR light but the digital camera can! Just turn on your digital camera and view your sensor through the camera.

Using my iPhone camera I could clearly see where my Sharp GP2D12 reflected back the IR light and I could adjust the IR sensor face the object more accurately.

Iphone IR detection

Share on Facebook

Facebook Connect: Only for grown ups

Ellen — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:03:45 +0000

In some Facebook Connect apps you might want to target an older audience. Any Facebook user is required to fill in their date of birth so the birthday field of the profile can be a way to check that your user has the appriopriate age for your application. This can be done by checking the birthday date of the user (birthday_date) using the function

users_getInfo($uid, ‘birthday_date’).

Important to remember though is that if the Facebook user has chosen not to show the birth year, this will not be available for the Facebook Connect application. To determine that the Facebook user has the appropriate age her settings on Facebook must look as follows:

Share on Facebook

Google Chart API – dynamic graphs & charts

Ellen — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:47:29 +0000

As I am gathering a report that I want to present online I have been looking for alternatives to screen dumping Excel charts. Of couse Google had a tool for this. They are providing an API for generating pie, lines and what have you charts. The neat thing is that they are dynamic. No Flash Player or screen dumping required. Google hosts the generated image and you can feed in data on the fly. This is great when presenting live data online. The image below shows a dynamic pie chart.

You can read about Google chart API here.

Google Chart API and Chart Generator Tool is a great tool to try it out.

To explore the field more Mashable made a short review of different pie charts.

Share on Facebook