In case you hadn't noticed, physical media are dying. Digital audio files long ago replaced CDs, movies are regularly available to stream, and games will download at the click of a mouse. There's no more reason to ever run to your local Best Buy . But there is still something alluring about physically touching your content source (just ask a vinyl fetishist). Jordi Parra, a Spanish design student, decided to combine that physical charm with digital convenience by creating a Spotify player, which streams tracks identified by small discs embedded with RFID tags.

Constructed of wood and plastic, Parra's Spotify radio has a decidedly analogue feel. While it takes its external design queues from old transistor radios, an Arduino processor resides inside, reading the tokens' RFID tags and looking for their associated music in the Spotify database. The device is a prototype constructed as his Masters thesis in Interactive Design at the Umea Institute of Design. Parra hopes to keep the project alive and wants to create a standalone version with an embedded version of Linux, Spotify and a speaker. (The current model actually plays the tunes through a computer; it must be connected via USB or Bluetooth.) To feast your eyes on more of the stunning creation check out the gallery below.
Gallery: Spotify Radio
Design Student Bring Physical Charm to Spotify originally appeared on Switched on Sun, 20 Feb 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The "Hello Arduino" section in Chapter 11 of Getting Started with Processing shows how to read data into Processing from Arduino. In a nutshell, the Arduino code (example 11-6 in the book) reads data from a light sensor and writes it out to the serial port. The section then goes on to describe a number of increasingly sophisticated sketches that retrieve and visualize the sensor data using Processing's Serial library.

This Codebox shows you how to save this sensor data to a Google Spreadsheet. The cool thing is that you can then use any of the goodies that Google provides (charts, gadgets, maps, etc) directly with your data. While the light sensor is pretty basic, you can use this basic setup to record data from more sophisticated sensors, such as a Parallax GPS receiver module into Google Spreadsheets, and then create a map of where you've been that you could post as a gadget.

The sketch relies on the Google API Client Library for Java, which is a set of code libraries for interacting with various Google's services (not just Spreadsheets). In researching this article, I found Processing guru Jer Thorpe's article Open Science, H1N1, Processing, and the Google Spreadsheet API a great inspiration. While it's based on an older version of the API (version 1.0, while the APIs are now up to version 3.0), it's a great introduction to interacting with Google. Thanks, Jer!


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Interesting paper from Neel Joshi, Sing Bing Kang, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Richard Szeliski at Microsoft Research, describing how they mounted 3 gyroscopes and a 3-axis accelerometer on a DSLR to record the camera's motion while a picture is being taken, and used that data to automatically deblur the resulting image at the software level. From their abstract:

We present a deblurring algorithm that uses a hardware attachment coupled with a natural image prior to deblur images from consumer cameras. Our approach uses a combination of inexpensive gyroscopes and accelerometers in an energy optimization framework to estimate a blur function from the camera's acceleration and angular velocity during an exposure. We solve for the camera motion at a high sampling rate during an exposure and infer the latent image using a joint optimization. Our method is completely automatic, handles per-pixel, spatially-varying blur, and out-performs the current leading image-based methods.

Their prototype is built on an Arduino. [via adafruit]

More:Touchscreen made of ice @Makezine.com blogHow-To: Modded camera looks at Kinect infrared outputDIY DSLR camera dollyBrooklyn man and son send camera into space


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