Tag Archives: art

Atkinson Dithering, Live in Processing

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resist1_500

Once upon a time in the 1980’s, computers had 1-bit displays, and the world was in (at least, so we understand from the pictures) gray scale.  Those grays were often represented by various types of dithering patterns, of which one of the most classic is Atkinson Dithering.

Atkinson Dithering is named after Bill Atkinson, the developer of classic Macintosh applications MacPaint and HyperCard, where this type of dithering contributed heavily to the look and feel of computer images in the era.

There are already a number of neat applications (listed below) that can perform Atkinson dithering on source images.  Today we’re releasing a neat little Processing sketch that takes video from your webcam and performs Atkinson dithering on it in real time, to produce live video continuously processed with the effect.

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Screen shot: Zener grudgingly sits in front of the webcam for dithering.  With Atkinson dithering, grays and detail are preserved well, but bright and dark regions tend to be washed out.

The net result is quite surprising, because dithered images like these feel like they should only exist in an era long before webcams and computer video.  And yet, they move.

The Atkinson dithering algorithm itself is a modified version of Floyd-Steinberg dithering, where the “error” between the intended gray level at each pixel and the black or white dot that is actually drawn at each pixel is distributed to neighboring points.

physics gangsign
Windell demonstrates the “right hand rule,” a common gang sign amongst physicists.

There are actually two versions of our “mirror dither”program, at different sizes.  One runs with full resolution in a modern 800×600 window. The other, shown above slightly reduced, is just 512×342, with rounded corners and a black border— giving you live dithered video, the same shape and size as an original Macintosh screen.

You can download the two versions of our program here.  The program is a “sketch” file that runs within Processing, which you can download here for your operating system.  (We’ve written and tested it under Processing version 2.0b6; other versions may work as well.)

And as we mentioned, there are also already plenty of good applications that perform Atkinson dithering for still photos:

 

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Evil Mad Scientist Halloween Projects

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EMSL Halloween Roundup

Halloween, one of our favorite holidays, is fast approaching. We’ve updated our Halloween Projects Archive once again to ensure that all of our Halloween projects are gathered together in one convenient location. If one of our projects inspires you to make something, we’d love to see the results in the flickr auxiliary.

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Art Controller for Aquaponics

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Control box

Logan wrote in to let us know how he is using our Art Controllers for his aquaponics project:

The system has two 140 gallon fish tanks and three 4×8 grow beds filled with grow stones. The beds water flow control is metered with Arduinos with data from Adafruit flow sensors on each bed. The important part is the bed water control, that is controlled by Art Controllers. We have almost 100 fat Talipia fish to fertilize the plants. The room is red because of all the high power LED grow lights.

grow beds under red light

The grow beds fill until a float switch trips the Art Controller that then opens a big 24 V solenoid valve draining the grow beds to a sump that pumps the cleaned water back to the fish tanks. The controller lets me program how long the beds stay drained so the plant roots get some O2 and not rot.

Thanks for sharing your project and pictures, Logan!

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Makerspace Launch

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The Makerspace program is a joint effort by O’Reilly’s Make division and Otherlab to put dedicated space and tools for hands-on making into high schools. They describe their aims on their about page:

By creating makerspaces in an educational context, students can have access to tools and equipment that they might not have otherwise; they can collaborate on projects that are driven by their own interests, and by doing so, develop the capacity and confidence to innovate. We see making as a gateway to deeper engagement in science and engineering but also art and design.

On Monday, September 10, we’ll be attending the Makerspace launch event at the College of San Mateo. We’ll be demoing a few kits and are excited to have the opportunity to meet educators interested in bringing making into the classroom. If you’ll be attending, please stop by our table and say hi!

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Klein Bottle Openers

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Klein Bottle Opener by Bathsheba Grossman

This is one of the coolest things that you can actually buy. It is a Klein Bottle Opener by Bathsheba Grossman.  It is made in the shape of a Klein Bottle, a 3D representation of a single sided shape.  And it opens bottles. It’s a 3D printed stainless steel sculpture that fits nicely in the hand, giving you just the right kind of leverage; an absolute pleasure to use.

Klein Bottle Opener

But— and this is where we were caught off guard— there’s a second great, yet completely independent, kind of Klein bottle opener out there: the Beverage Tool by Klein Tools. Klein tools is quite truly (as they say), “the #1 choice among professional tradesmen.”

We happened upon this gem at Hand-Eye Supply, the Core77 store, while visiting Portland, Oregon.  As far as we can tell, it was there because they like well-made tools, including those from Klein, not because they like mathematics.

Klein Bottle Opener

The tool has convenient “Tip-Ident” mark in the shape of a bottle cap so you can quickly find it among other tools.

And now, dear reader, you know where to get a complete set of Klein bottle openers.

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CNC Art from StippleGen 2

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Lasercut cardboard

These two real-world examples of CNC Art made using StippleGen 2 come from Bruce Shapiro, who created them at The Mill. Above, a stippled portrait of Einstein is laser cut into cardboard, using light stipples on a dark background. Below, a paper mask was applied to a piece of wood, v-carved with a CNC router, spray painted, and then the mask was removed. This time, a light background with dark stipples was used.

Wood: masked and painted

The same source image was used for both, although the image is mirrored for the wooden portrait.

It’s great to see some examples of what StippleGen can do out there in the real world. If you have any examples of your own to share, we’d love to see them in the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary pool on flickr.

Photos by Bruce Shapiro used with permission.

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StippleGen 2

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StippleGen 5

Two months ago, we introduced StippleGen, a program that can generate stipple diagrams and “TSP path” art from images, using Adrian Secord’s algorithm of weighted Voronoi stippling.  It’s a great (and free) tool for turning a photo into CNC-ready artwork, for use on the Eggbot or in other contexts.

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Today we’re announcing a new verison, StippleGen 2. As with the earlier version, StippleGen 2 is free and open source software, written in the Processing development environment. It comes ready to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it is available for download now.

StippleGen 2 comes with three new features: A gently redesigned set of controls that makes life easier on tiny laptop screens, an inverse color scheme— as illustrated above —so that you can now calculate white stipples on a black background, and comprehensive documentation on our Wiki.

newgui

The controls in StippleGen 2 have been redesigned and streamlined. They are also overall a bit thinner so that the full screen (and all of the controls) can now be viewed on an 11″ MacBook Air, without reducing the size of the main display area.

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In the first version of StippleGen, the image was always computed with black dots on a white background. For most images that have a light-colored background, this is a good choice.  However, if you have an image with a dark background, you may find that nearly all of your stipples are used to just darken the backdrop, leaving less detail available in the foreground of the image.

StippleGen 2 gives you the option to draw with black stipples on a white background or white stipples on a black background. By using a dark background here, you may be able to recognize Rembrandt in just 2000 white stipples.

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It does, of course, look better with a larger number of points.

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For images with a lot of black and a lot of white, it can be hard to choose which is the better scheme.

However, as this is tool to generate applied artwork, the choice is often made for you in advance.  If you are drawing with a black pen on a white egg, you’ll want black stipples.  On the other hand, if you’re carving into a black panel, white stipples might be the better choice.

 

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starry10kw

And here are a couple of other “test images” that we’ve been running in the new color scheme.

plant10k_vor

And finally, we have written up comprehensive documentation for StippleGen 2, hosted on the Evil Mad Science Wiki.

StippleGen 2 is free and open source software, now available for download here.
Go try it out for yourself!

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StippleGen: Weighted Voronoi stippling and TSP paths in Processing

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grace2k-2

One of the perennial problems that we come across in a variety of contexts, including CNC artwork and producing artwork for the Egg-Bot, is the difficulty of creating good-quality toolpaths– i.e., vector artwork representing halftones –when starting from image files.

One of the finest solutions that we’ve ever come across is TSP art,” where the image is represented by a single continuous path. You can generate a path like this by connecting all of the dots in a stipple diagram. Designing a route that visits each dot exactly once is an example of the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (or TSP). From the standpoint of toolpaths (for the Egg bot and most other CNC machines), a “TSP” path is even nicer than stipples, because little or no time is spent raising and lowering the tool.

Today we’re releasing a new program, StippleGen, which can generate stipple diagrams from images, using Secord’s algorithm. StippleGen saves its files as editable, Eggbot-ready Inkscape SVG files, which can in turn be opened by other vector graphics programs, or re-saved as PDF files for use in other contexts. It can also generate a TSP path from the stippled image, and either save that path as an SVG file or simply use that path as the order of plotting for the stipple diagram.

StippleGen is free and open source software, written in the Processing development environment. It comes ready to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it is available for download now.

Continue reading StippleGen: Weighted Voronoi stippling and TSP paths in Processing →

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Capitalism Works For Me! True/False

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Capitalism Works For Me! True/False

Capitalism Works For Me! True/False is a beautiful interactive art piece by Steve Lambert designed to spark conversation around a difficult subject. It was made after a successful kickstarter campaign and is now touring the country.

From the project description:

Start a conversation about capitalism and friends edge away slowly, and strangers even faster. This is what art is for. This is what art does well. It creates a space where new ideas and perspectives can be explored. A space unlike any other.

Our very own 12″ seven segment displays were used for showing the vote tallies as viewers interact with the piece.

After being first displayed in Cleveland, it is currently on its way to Boston for the 2012 deCordova Biennial which opens January 22. You can check up on its progress and destinations through kickstarter updates or Steve’s site.

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CNC halftones with ASCII art

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ASCII CNC 23

 

ASCII CNC 21

Recently we have seen some fantastic DIY examples of CNC image carving with traditional halftones and alternative versions with regions generated with reaction-diffusion equations. More impressively, all of this is now possible with freely available, homegrown software released by the people behind those projects (Here and here.)

Seeing these examples reminded us of another “classic” method of making halftones: ASCII art. In what follows, we walk through the process of using making CNC halftones for engraving or carving from both vintage and automatically generated ASCII art. Continue reading CNC halftones with ASCII art →

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