Please Touch Gallery at Center Arts (by sarah)

Today has been hectic with far to much crammed in but we are very glad we managed it all. One of the highlights was going to the Please Touch exhibit at Center Arts in Cheltenham.

This contains two pieces of my own science art - the Life Coral which has been displayed before and Sweet a textural visualisation of sugar specifically sucrose (though only as I ran out of time to knit more molecules!).

The concept of this exhibition is to allow those who are visually impaired to enjoy the art, to raise awareness and to experience art primarily through the sense of touch rather than sight.

I really liked this fabric piece

This history of art in smiley faces done by Zaphira was Mary's favorite piece 🙂

The children especially loved the art, Jean and Mary both go much happiness out of the gallery. Mary just because she could interact with the art work and Jean as she could explore it and no one shouted at her for touching it! (though she did get into trouble for trying to convert one of them into an archeological dig).

Jean loved the glass sculptures especially - there was a magnifier with a light for those who have some vision but not much.

My favourite was this landscape and it piece as a whole along with the science festival has led me and Alaric to want to resurrect a resin casting project we have.

Molecular Knitting (by sarah)

This is my knitted sucrose molecule still missing some of it's hydrogens. It has worked out both better and worse than I expected - as a first attempt I think it's great personally. My long term plan is to knit molecular assembles so groups of molecules as say found in tea, comet tails and chocolate... you get the idea 🙂

The finished knit is part of the work I will have on display at Centre Arts Cheltenham as part of their charity Exhibition Please Touch. The idea behind my knitted molecule is to give a tactile visualisation as it were of what how a molecule fits together - it is basically a model.

They have also asked for The Tree of Life Coral to be there which makes me very excited - I would have loved to have the sound cave up and running for this but it took too long to get the basic funding so that is going to appear later in the year and at a few things next year. There is still time to fund the Sound/Sensory Cave though not much! I have reached target but the excess money will go towards a science-art exhibition next year in March.

AVR microcontrollers and Arduinos. (by alaric)

I'm a fan of the Atmel AVR microcontroller. The main competitors in its area are the older 8051 and PIC architectures, which have less pleasant instruction sets and are generally harder to program.

Ease of programming is key. Most AVRs can be programmer via a SPI link, which is just four digital I/O pins following a widespread standard that most microcontrollers can drive, and there are widespread interfaces to drive an SPI bus from a PC. It's almost as good as the LPC2000 series 32-bit microcontrollers' asynchronous serial programming interface, which can be driven from an RS-232 port with a little bit of level shifting. I'm also a fan of the LPC2000s, but they fit into a higher-powered niche than the AVRs!

A long time ago I did some AVR development professionally, with a programming board driven from a PC parallel port by some Windows software. I still have the board, and a windows PC with a parallel port and the software installed sitting under a desk, but the "activation energy" of getting the PC powered up and plugged into a keyboard and monitor, and digging out the board, and having to deal with Windows-based development software and all that has stopped me from doing anything with AVRs for a while, given my shortage of time.

However, Sarah has tasked me with developing some electronics for her, as part of a project she's working on. And it looked like the easiest way of doing what's required will be to drop an AVR in.

But rather than dig out the Windows-based dev environment, I've just picked up a USBtiny ISP kit for less money than my original AVR dev system cost. It runs off of a USB port, and supports an entirely open-source AVR toolchain that I can run on my laptop. Inside, it's just an AVR itself, with a USB interface on one end and a SPI interface on the other; everything that I need in one neat little package.

As a plus, it has a cable coming out that I can plug into a header on the board the AVR is part of; my old dev board needed me to pull the chip out of its circuit and put it into the board to program it. Pah!

But while I was there, I also picked up an Arduino Uno. This is a little gadget that has been taking the hobbyist electronics world by storm lately; it's basically an AVR on a board with an inbuilt USB programming interface and a bunch of female headers to make it easy to wire up to various things, and some software to let you program it in C easily with a useful library. There's a wide range of boards that plug directly into the headers to do all sorts of fun stuff, too.

Now, I'm a bit disdainful of the Arduino; given the ability to program bare AVRs directly and to assemble my own circuits on protoboard, I can easily do all sorts of stuff that Arduinos can't, at a fraction of the cost.

However, they're great for beginners, as they are plug and play devices; you can get started without touching a soldering iron or having to work out which pin is which. My disdain is purely personal, I think they're a great thing for the community as a whole 🙂

So why am I getting one, I hear you ask? Well, I have a wife who wants to be able to control LEDs and a six year old daughter who is passionate about building a robot, so I'll be glad to have an easy-to-use module I can just hand them rather than needing to build AVR boards for them all the time; but mainly, I plan to use it as a Bus Pirate clone by putting a FORTH on it along with some words to do things like I2C and SPI...

Goldy (by sarah)

This is a rubbish photo of the fish but until he becomes a bit more accustomed to things it is probably all we are going to get - his name is Goldy the Goldfish and Jean won him at the Fair. We were a bit alarmed to see that this was still going on and the more we explained why it wasn't a good idea to get one of the fish the more determined she became to get one as they looked so sad :/

So to cut a long story short she had a set budget for the Fair - she got a goldfish - we all went home to sort the gold fish out - she insisted on carrying him home herself and fretted about weather he could breath and showed him to any and all other children we passed along the way.

I told of my carnival fish Sandy and Shelly that I had at her age and Daddy spoke of how he and his mother used to win as many of them as they could in order to save them when he was little.

Alaric turns out to be a fish expert (at least as far as goldfish are concerned) and we had wanted to get fish as the New House Pets as there had been fish here when we came to look around.

Once home Alaric and Jean set about equalising temperatures of water with the bag in a bowl - so that the poor thing wouldn't get shocked being put in new water. Then we zoomed out to buy supplies. Which being a bank holiday wasn't that easy!

It is only a small tank for now as we just don't have the money but hopefully say next month we can get a larger one - Goldy seems abit worried about the space to be honest and has mainly hidden behind the plastic plant and dug himself a little whole in the gravel.

Today we went to the Aquatic Habitate to get a real plant and a snail - Jean wanted a shrimp but apparently Goldy would eat it (it was not much smaller than Goldy!). Anyway Jeany has named the snail Slimy and is now obsessed with alliteration :/

Again Jean insisted on carrying the snail and has been very militant about feeding the fish and has even taken to remembering to feed her rabbit without being reminded.

I'm glad we have the fish and we are all looking forward to establishing an ecosystem but we were not happy to find them at the Fair and worse than that - in rescuing Goldy we are supporting the trade :/ But Goldy actually came out to see us today when we came in which we think is a good sign 🙂

The Tooth Fairy Left a Letter (by sarah)

Jean lost her second tooth in the new house yesterday and spent the day worrying that they wouldn't find it as we still haven't found the tooth cusion I'd made her. She was also doing lots of wondering about how the tooth fairy would get into the house and lift the tooth and swap the money and did they go big/small, or could they walk through walls and were they a boy or a girl?

So she left a letter.

And the tooth fairy answered it. I thought it was just pictures but Jean pointed out it was a letter written in Fairy Language so she immediatly demanded to go on the computer to see if wikipedia could help her translate it. But after some google searching it became evident that there are lots of different fairy languages and dialects and when Jean looked closer she found that the symbols were very toothy and so we came to the conclusion that this is a specific tooth fairy language.

There are teeth and pliers and ladders and pillows and moons.

I told Jean we would probably have to wait until Daddy got home and she could work at translating it with him. She looked very serious and took the letter and sat staring at it about ten minutes later she announced that this symbol was M and this symbol N and before long she had worked out the second word was Jean.

'It now sort of looks like Jean as well Mummy' and she's right it does. She got the first few lines translated before school. And there was me thinking I would have to phone Tooth Head Quarters and ask for a key so we could find out what the letter ment.

Of course as the fairy borrowed one of mummy's pens Jean did initially accuse me of writing the letter until I pointed out I couldn't read what it said.