Owen Trueblood

Microfluidic Display Experiment

Owen Trueblood

Sandwiched between transparent glass and PDMS the channels were ghostly white until liquids were pumped through them, at which point the networks they composed stood out brightly in 3D space.

Art, Hardware, Arduino, Tool, Robotics, Plotter, Graphics

Drawing a 3D Scene in Blender with a Pen Plotter

Owen Trueblood

Pen plotters are an attractive tool and toy for anyone interested in computer graphics or generative art. The simple machines draw with a pen or pencil on paper under the control of computer code. Possessing infinite patience, such machines can build up complex imagery defined by digital information or rule

Art, Software, LEDs, Microcontrollers

Streaming Graphics to a Distributed LED Display over WiFi

Owen Trueblood

Space Within Spaces is an art installation by Joseph Morris installed in the Juliana Terian Design Center Atrium on the Pratt Institute campus in Brooklyn, New York. The installation uses an 18x10 array of light bulbs to form an ambient display for graphics generated based on muon activity through a

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Beta Processor Extensions

Owen Trueblood

The Beta was a made-up processor used for teaching undergraduate computer science at MIT. Students in the Computation Structures class (6.004) were required to build an implementation from scratch out of logic gates and implement an operating system for it by the end of the class. It was one

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Miscellaneous Projects

Owen Trueblood

Artifact while reverse engineering the HP FB-500 RIP system.Images by poking CDs with 3D printer hotendDepth-from-focus 3D scanner v1Depth from focus 3D scanner v18972 Sneaky RF -> Bluetooth HID bridgeLighting assembly for a project that cannot not be named3D printed metal LED heat sink for a project that

blog, Robotics, Teaching

Workshop: Synthesizing Human and Robot Movements for Art Production

Owen Trueblood

During the 2019 Independent Activities Period (IAP) at MIT I helped set up and run a workshop held in the MIT Museum Studio on art production with a UR5 industrial robot arm. Ten participants stuck with it through to the end, creating 5 final projects that were exhibited in the

gallery, Software, Art

Automata

Owen Trueblood

Art made by abstract machines is made meaningful in abstract minds

blog, Robotics

Robotically Assisted Photogrammetry

Owen Trueblood

Exploring the potential of automated photogrammetry captures using a UR5 robot arm.

blog, Art, Filmmaking, Robotics, LEDs

Light Painting with a UR5 Robot Arm

Owen Trueblood

In an attempt to visually convey the activity of a painting UR5 robot in static images I did some experiments capturing long exposure photographs of an LED light source attached to the end of the arm. The light is controlled by the I/O connector at the end of the

blog, Hardware, Reverse Engineering

Sound Machine Sound Swap

Owen Trueblood

Replacing the samples on an obnoxiously loud and irresponsibly cheap sound toy.

blog, Hardware, Reverse Engineering, Art, Assembly Code, Microcontrollers, Raspberry-pi, Software

Hex Bug Swarm

Owen Trueblood

For an art project during a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab we wanted to have a swarm of "creatures" under computer control. The concept called for these creatures to participate in a simulated society, which would be guided by a crowd of humans online. They had to look like

brief, Software, Graphics, Visualization

OpenStreetMap Visualization Experiment

Owen Trueblood

https://www.instagram.com/p/BavCKqhlWQd/Open Street Map data for New York City drawn so that nodes which were adjacent in the file were colored with adjacent colors in a continuous palette. The surprisingly pretty result of a quick test of some map data parsing code I was working

blog, Art, Robotics, VR

Controlling a Painting Machine with a Vive Controller

Owen Trueblood

I spent some time collaborating with the artist Jeff Leonard (Instagram), who has built fantastic painting machines for himself in the course of developing his art practice. The machines are mostly controlled by Arduino boards directly from sensors and devices like potentiometers, buttons, joy sticks, sliders, etc. I was interested

blog, Art, VR, AR

Black Squares

Owen Trueblood

Connecting the "zero point" in painting to the common visuals of computer generated art.

blog, Hardware, AR, Assembly Code, Microcontrollers, Graphics, Retro-computing, Software

Lofi Calculator AR

Owen Trueblood

Off-screen there is an Arduino Nano plugged into the communication port of the TI-83 which is converting a stream of video data (96x64 monochrome frames) into the TI port protocol. An assembly program on the calculator very rapidly transfers the video data to screen memory. A 3D scan of me

Hardware, Raspberry-pi, Teensy, Graphics, LEDs

The Very Large LED Array

Owen Trueblood

A bunch of LEDs mounted on a 4x8' sheet of plywood

blog, Graphics, Hardware, Web Application, LEDs, Software

L3D Cube Library

Owen Trueblood

I worked for Looking Glass Factory for a little bit and wrote the first support library for the Spark Core (now Particle). It was extremely fun and hard to get WebSockets to work well on an embedded platform. I also made some of the demos that they used for the

blog, Art, Ancient, Calculator Hacking

Calculator Love

Owen Trueblood

During high school the only computer I had access to during school days was my beloved TI-84+ graphing calculator. It was a surprisingly enjoyable platform for practicing programming. The built-in TI-BASIC programming editor and simple drawing commands meant that it was easy to create small graphical demos and games, which

blog, Hardware, Microcontrollers, Assembly Code, Game Development, Retro-computing, Ancient

Demomite

Owen Trueblood

A game in 2KB of code, 128 bytes of RAM, 8 million instructions per second, and 2 days

brief, Processing, Software, Game Development