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New Arduino Books in 2012

Wow, there are a lot of Arduino books coming out this year. Here are some of them, mostly from Apress or Make / O’Reilly:

  • Android and Arduino: Take the Physical World Mobile With the Mega ADK
  • Arduino and Kinect Projects: Design, Build, Blow Their Minds
  • Arduino Robot Bonanza
  • Arduino Wearables
  • Arduino, Sensors, and the Cloud
  • Beginning Android ADK with Arduino
  • Codebox: Adventures with Processing and Arduino
  • Environmental Monitoring with Arduino: Building Simple Devices to Collect Data About the World Around Us
  • Getting Started with Netduino
  • Getting Started with NFC: Contactless Communication with Android, Arduino, and Processing
  • Getting Started with RFID: Identify Objects in the Physical World with Arduino
  • Learn Electronics with Arduino
  • Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot
  • Pro Arduino
  • Programming Your Home: Automate with Arduino, Android, and Your Computer
  • Sensor Interfaces for Arduino: Importing the Universe

I will review several of these for potential hyperRitual and Robomancy.com projects.

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Talismachine Draft

Here is a proof-of-concept draft I made last night, for the talismachines. The print was designed in Inkscape and laser-printed onto cotton letterhead, then hand-painted over with Bare electrically conductive paint. It includes a coin-cell battery, on-off switch, and white LED from the LilyPad Arduino family. The inverted triangle in the upper-right is an alchemical symbol for blood, and contains a drop of (my) blood.

Talismachine Draft 2

The magical purpose of the talisman is to give “great knowledge and wisdom in mechanical arts,” and it features the sigil of the Goetic demon Barbas (or Marbas). It shows also the hammer and anvil of Tubal Cain, and a classical symbol for fire indicating Hephaestus/Vulcan. Its practical purpose is to experiment with the media. The proper talismachines will be screen-printed on parchment or canvas, and will include a LilyPad microcontroller for more interesting interactions. I may need to run conductive thread behind the parchment, because the Bare Paint rapidly increases its resistance over the lines.

Talismachine Draft 5

Click here for more photos.

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Dreaming of a Radionics Renaissance

I have been reading The Secret Art: A Brief History of Radionic Technology for the Creative Individual, which makes a case for art as radionics (you can read the book’s excellent intro, here), and musing about how open-source and accessible development tools such as Processing and Arduino could facilitate a new era of designs in radionic and psionic machines. The idea is not new to me—I have been mulling it for a few years now—but as my Automagica Theoretica course comes to its official end this week, I am thinking much more about it.

I would love to see online, collaborative communities emerge around this sort of thing. Like the community of psionic machine enthusiasts that developed in and around Astounding Science Fiction (and later, Analog) in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, but more distributed and accessible. I would love to see it be open-source. Perhaps an interactive catalog of designs, like SourceForge for software, or Open Design Engine for open-source hardware (congratulations to those guys for a successful Kickstarter, BTW). Arduino lets you add knobs, buttons, and switches to pretty much anything—from cigar boxes to t-shirts. Or how about “soft” radionic devices running on our mobile telephones and tablet computers? My imagination boggles at the variety of apps one could develop for these media.

Who’s with me?

The Pathoclast

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11.10.13 Update

Just a note to let people know what is happening with hyperRitual…

Automagica Theoretica has been going very well; my most popular course to date. I have proposed several more courses to the Arcanorium staff, for later this year or next. I should also be putting on the “Controlling the World with a Magic Wand” class at Jigsaw Renaissance, soon.

I am writing an article about using Conceptual Blending as a ritual design tool especially when mapping between magic and technology.

Edited 2011.11.28.20.39: Still planning the robomancy project. In addition to the Parallax S2, I will be featuring Guilherme Martin’s Farrusco (first mentioned on hyperRitual here) and some other Arduino-based robots.

The robomancy stuff will coincide with a series of demonstrations in (mostly gestural) interfaces for manipulating magic symbols, which will also be developed with Arduino and Processing.

I do not have any new tech to show off right now, but here are a couple of Daniel Schulke prints I recently had framed, that inspire the magical (especially, witchy) aspects of my work.

Daniel Schulke Print 1

Daniel Schulke Print 2