Today, after idly searching the Internet for something interesting to read I decided to make good on part of my New Years goals and look at the Natural User Interface Group’s site again.  I’m happy to report that they’ve put up a wiki and have some pretty nice informational articles on natural user interface concepts such as multitouch and terminology used to discuss these topics.

I’m going to have to dig around in some of my still packed boxes to see if I can find my materials for this project and get it going again, however I suspect that it will have to wait until Spring or Summer before I get any actual construction done on it.  I might take one of the infrared LEDs and hook it up to my Arduino microcontroller and mess with that a bit, since its an easy platform to mess with on my coffee table.

Fun stuff!

That’s “Hello World” in Italian, according to some random online translator!  This is my new Arduino Duemilanove (2009) microcontroller, which my parents got me for Christmas.  As you can see, I have followed instructions well and hooked up this LED and enabled it to blink at varying rates.  This is the equivalent of the “Hello World” program in coding, the most simple unit of work you can make to verify that you’ve got the basics correct.

I’m pretty excited about this little thing.  When I first saw it, I was taken back to my college microcontrollers class where we had to do this same type of thing with a big honkin’ microcontroller kit.  It was a little magical to me, being able to make my computer programs affect actual hardware components… I know you can argue that I’ve been doing that all along as I’ve been coding, but its neat to control things directly at the hardware level instead of having it hidden under layers upon layers of software intended to dumb down the details.

I’m not entirely sure what playing with this thing will lead to, I had designs on learning more about proximity sensors in hopes that could help my multitouch table, but I’m not entirely sure how that would fit into the planned architecture I have for that thing.  We’ll see how it shapes up, if nothing else this will make me more comfortable working with electronic components.

Very fun!