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]]> http://jordan.husney.com/archives/2012/02/xbee_garage_door.php http://jordan.husney.com/archives/2012/02/xbee_garage_door.php Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:14:04 -0600 Over the past two weeks I've been involved in the construction of an Art Shanty Project called the DancyShanty.

Art Shanty Projects is a four-week exhibition that is part sculpture park, part artist residency and part social experiment, inspired by traditional ice fishing houses that dot the state's lakes in winter. It is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.

The DanceShanty, an innocuous white structure on a frozen lake, draws you inside with music and the sound of people having fun. As you enter you are invited to hangup your coat and dance!

My part in the DanceShanty was to design the lighting system for the project. Hans Scharler of ioBridge/ThingSpeak had shared the Cheerlights project with me where people have interconnected strands of GE Color Effects LED lights using ThingSpeak and a variety of communications components including Digi ConnectPort X2 Internet-to-ZigBee gateways and of course, good ol' Digi XBee radios.

I love lights. A hackable strand of full-color RGB Christmas lights are a dream come true. I found a strand of 25 lights for $25 at Sears. A little Processing and Arduino code (using my friend Rob Faludi's excellent book, of course!) and I had a prototype working in an evening. Using an SparkFun XBee Shield and a pair of Series 1 XBee Radios I was able to made the whole setup wireless—and able to hide away the PC from view while being able to maintain a connection to the lights. I work for Digi, so every design screams like it needs to be made wireless.

I am going to do a full tech write-up with source-code soon. The laptop I have in the DanceShanty now is old and slow and only able to run the display at about 10 frames per second. The Arduino code I wrote is able to run four synchronized strands of lights at well over 30 frames per second as you can see from the below staging video:

Before the DanceShanty comes down I am going to write a quick mobile app and connect the setup to people via iDigi in order to allow people dancing to choose the color and visualization mode of the lights. It's going to be sweet!

I took advantage of the holiday break to do some digital re-organization. I've retired my tired & faithful Gentoo Linux server and pushed everything up to "the cloud"&emdash;a virtual hosted server within Rackspace.

I'm no stranger to the cloud. I'm Product Manager at Digi International for the iDigi Device Cloud allowing ubiquitous access to any device to any application, anywhere. My home thermostat, gas and water meters are connected to my iPhone for monitoring and control via Digi International's Energy Daytrader application--incidentally, Energy Daytrader won Postscapes People's Choice aware for Best Internet of Things Self Tracking Application of 2011.

None of us are strangers to the cloud: so many of us use web-based e-mail applications such as GMail, social networking sites such as LinkedIn, and storage services such as Dropbox. We even use less obvious clouds like Flickr, Netflix and Hulu. In a sense even common infrastructure such as the mobile phone networks from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint can be seen as clouds if one takes the term "cloud" to mean massively scalable, multi-tenant and secure products distributed as a service. I just hate the term cloud, it's opaque and literally nebulous.

Nonetheless the cloud is great. I migrated my Linux box up to Rackspace's cloud storage in hours using Duplicity and then executed a few commands to migrate my databases and get my webserver running. My site is faster, I can easily scale the performance and it's fully backed up. I'm so happy!

Hosting my machine at Rackspace will cost me about $263 per year or $21.90 per month. The electricity alone on my old server cost me about $60 per year or about $5.00 per month. Taking electricity into account, my overall cost of switching to the cloud is around $17 per month which I deem to be a fair price for the additional performance and services I receive.

I've got some big plans for 2012. Watch this space!

Image Source: Library of Congress

As Paros is an island, you've got to take a boat. I didn't immediately realize the significance of this until I was on board the ferry and motoring away from the hazy landmass of Athens. Out in the middle of the Aegean--long, long before the sea appeared to me as brushstroke washes of ultramarine blue and viridian green--I felt as though I was not only traveling but emigrating.

Surely I knew what I had signed up for: I wasn't leaving an impoverished, famine stricken land carrying all my portable property for a chance at a better life on Paros. I was vacationing from New York City to learn how to paint. Yet, there was a palpably different feeling to this trip.

Our incredible professor (and my friend of some years from Minnesota), Jun-Pierre Shiozawa, collected us individually from the ferry port as we arrived. We were taken to our quarters, a small set of apartments only 200 paces from the sea. I was shown the café in town were we would receive our free student meals. I was shown where to shop for our own groceries. I was shown where to walk to reach the classroom. I was even taught the particularities of the Greek toilet. These basic instructions heightened my sense of emigration. I wouldn't only be taught how to paint, I would be shown how to live.

During our first classroom session we had received an outline detailing our expected arrival time for each day, the topic to be covered during the day's class, and the start time and subject of the evening lecture. Still, many details were omitted--would we paint indoors or on excursion? If we are going out, Where are we going? What will we be painting? Can we choose what to paint? The intentional vagary bothered some of our fellow students. Answers to these questions were occasionally demanded. I was exhilarated.

Each day unfolded magnificently. Early in the morning we had time to do as we pleased. I would wake early to take a dip in the sea, sketch or paint, and take a walk to town for a fresh baked spanikopita or Greek yogurt with honey. Classroom time was dynamic. Jun-Pierre would instruct on a topic of focus and provide a variety of hands-on exercises. For example, on the class period focusing on color Jun had us create a variety of color wheels using a particular color family and using a variety of wet and dry brush techniques. After creating these wheels he had us wash over them with various colors to understand their effects. We would break from one in the afternoon until four-thirty. We could do whatever we wanted during the break. Many of us chose to eat lunch at our designated cafe, Cafe ???????? (Distrato). Some of us would then swim, shop, or nap. Often for the resumption of class we would take an excursion to someplace on the island such as a superlatively beautiful hillside, monastery, or windmill overlooking sea and rock where we would practice applying the day's classroom instruction. In the evening there was often an optional lecture offered by a professor at the Aegean Center. Night would mean dinner on our own, perhaps a final night swim under moonlight and then sleep. Sleep! The kind of sleep that comes quickly to those who are satisfied, exhausted, and content to be lulled by soft breezes and the sound of the sea.

After our second week of studying, exploring, and tasting something wonderful happened. We were more relaxed, our personalities had settled in to one another. I gathered the distinct sense that it became less about what we expected from the class and more about being able to absorb everything we were being offered. Our work reflected this. Our conversations and deportment reflected this. We had a rhythm and a little livelihood on Paros, no matter how transitory. Rather sadly, following our student show it was time to leave.

We came by boat and we left by boat. New York and the old life was calling. It was time to strip myself of my Greek sandals and my responsibly cultivated tan to once again return to pushing my plow through fields of ones and zeros. And after so much! I had eaten incredible locally grown food. I had mastered zigzagging from shadow to shadow in order to avoid the summer sun. I had learned how to draw, to paint, to see. Now, it was time to return. I may not always have fresh urchin roe, but I'm forever changed. I know because I did not merely visit, I had emigrated--even if it was only temporary.

The ferry approaches on the horizon. Hot people queue haphazardly in bunches, luggage awkwardly in tow. Up until the last moments there are kind words, embraces, and well wishing. It is unlike air travel: the airline security acting as a hermetic seal between your destination and airport-land and all airport-lands connected by flying tubes of recycled air. With air travel you enter on one side of the tube and come out uncomfortably on the other. This produces an illusion that destinations belong to differing neighborhoods within a grand scale world-metropolis. Objects seem closer than they appear. Traveling by boat is different. Up on the deck of the boat you can see the land and your loved ones standing there, all getting smaller and receding slowly into the distance. They recede just as slowly as the thought, wouldn't it be great if I could stay forever?

Funds raised during the Sleep Out allow IOCP to respond to more than 1,800 emergency housing crises...Every month, IOCP turns away about 20 worthy housing requests because of lack of funds.

If you'd like to donate to this cause please see: https://iocp.ejoinme.org/?tabid=220097&joinme=2087

andrewzimmern Andrew Zimmern

A pic from my pal @Jordan_Husney’s meal @ Wondrous Awful Kitchen in MPLS. You cant make this crap up. http://twitpic.com/2xcbyq

If you don't notice any half-naked wingmen you are likely to notice the colossal American flag hanging on the tall west wall of the baggage claim. The familiar red and white stripes of the flag have been made by a patchwork of hand painted art immediately recognizable as the work of young children.

The flag is immediately adjacent to the Hertz Rent-a-Car kiosk. While I stood in line I took it all in. I attempted to try and devote my attention to each and every one of the panels in turn. Later I had learned that the art was constructed by area elementary school students. They had been asked to paint the answer to a simple question, "what does it mean to be American?"

The minority of patches answer the question directly: "respect for all," "choices," "liberty," and may contain emblematic symbols such as the statue of liberty or an eagle. Others are preachy: "Jesus is Lord," "God Bless America," "ALL RELIGION PREFERENCE RESPECTED" (sic), "down with war." Many give thanks to the armed services: "thanks nat'l guard," "marines thanks," and "come home soon." And still others are plane dada: a truck, a frog, and beautiful rendering of some juicy ripe tomatoes.

Out of the more than 600 patches which comprise the flag, my one true favorite is the girl who took the initiative. The proud. The unique. The individual who wasn't afraid to put her stamp of individuality and stake a claim of ownership of these United States. The girl who wrote her name in big, beautiful red letters: Jessie Mae Williams.

Dear Jessie, you have brilliantly captured what I feel is the true essence of America. To you, Jessie Mae Williams, the spirit of America!