Cake holders

Now you’ve learned how to bake some delicious Cake objects (hop over here if you’ve forgotten!), we need something to put them in. Step forward arrays. Arrays are a special sort of list – they have slots in them, like an old-fashioned milk bottle holder, that you can place things into. The restriction is that you have to tell Processing when you create your list both how big you want it to be, and what sorts of thing you want to put into it. Afterwards, your array can only hold a maximum of that number of those particular objects. For … More

Zombies, Cakes & Goddam People

On Saturday, I gave a talk at the University of Birmingham Women in Tech conference, based on 3 key quotes. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic Arthur C. Clarke If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people … always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano I have in me both north and south polarities; … the deepest Analysis, with brilliant Imagination forever playing on the surface of those grave & fathomless depths. Ada Lovelace, 1844 (Letter to Michael Faraday) More

Cake Orchestra

I like music, but I can’t play an instrument. I also like cakes and own an Arduino. So I put them all together to make a Cake Orchestra: a snack interface for music. LDR version Ingredients Light-dependent resistors (LDRs) Ordinary resistors & connecting wire Arduino Computer running Processing Soundcipher Processing library More

Learning to code – resources

A great starter for those of an artistic leaning to learn to code is Processing: a specially-designed open-source tool aimed to get you up and creating visual experiments quickly.  You are given a big head start to create chunks of code, organised into “sketches”. More