Just a quick update on my progress with learning to use Lightshow Pi software and a Raspberry Pi computer to create a Halloween lightshow. I have built a system that synchronizes eight channels of lighting effects to music. Here is a clip that shows what it looks like:

This is a re-post and update of a blog post I wrote some years ago on my old edublogs blog.

You can create simulated 3-D stereoscope photograph by wiggling two slightly different angles of the same pictures, as shown in this picture of my wife & daughter. I’ve been wanting to experiment with this for some time after reading about Wiggle Stereoscopy. I have created this image by showing two successive images in an animated gif picture made with ImageReady.

The two images I am using were not made with this technique in mind, but when I viewed them together it seemed to work. I think it might work better if I kept the camera on the same horizontal plane, rather than changing both horizontal and vertical viewing angle. But like I said, the two images were accidentally made.

We are able to see in 3-D because our two eyes see the world from slightly different angles. A Viewmaster toy is a good example of a true 3-D stereoscope. This technique is only simulated because you aren’t viewing both images at the same time. It’s still pretty cool, isn’t it? What do you think?

The animated fountain gif image shown above was created in Photoshop using two frames. A simple Google search will provide instructions on how to do animated gifs in Photoshop so I won’t go into detail here.

Since my original experiment with wiggle stereoscopes using animated gifs and Photoshop, I’ve also dabbled in creating 3D imagery using AfterEffects. You can see an example of what this looks like below:

Two years ago, I bought a Raspberry Pi “for the family” and we messed with it for a while, but it soon found its way to sitting a box in the closet.

Last year around Christmastime, I explored an idea that’s been floating around in my head on making a Christmas light display set to music. It wasn’t long before I found this post on making Christmas tree lights flash to music.

I became intrigued enough to order the solid state relay board that was recommended, and since they were cheap I purchased two. I think they came directly from China because they took several weeks to arrive. By that time, the new year had arrived, and my interest waned. I put them in the closet with the Pi, thinking maybe next year.

With the cooler weather and heading into fall, I’ve been thinking ahead and wondering if I couldn’t make those things actually work in a lightshow. As you can see from the video at the beginning of this post, things are actually coming together. It took me quite a while to sort out what needed to be done, and to get the information I needed to make things work. I was so excited when I actually got the first light to blink!

In the next post, I will write a step by step set of instructions of what I learned, so hopefully it can help save someone some time getting things set up. I’m nowhere near an expert on this, but am very happy that some things are starting to come together.

***Edit***

With a little more tinkering, I was able to get three channels working with some music . I’m still working on a tutorial post on how it was done. In the mean time, here’s a short video of the lights & music.

Here is a cool project we did last Halloween in my Visual Literacy class.  My student created a pattern in Adobe Illustrator from an image “Soul Eater Moon” which evidently comes from the Soul Eater manga. I’m not “with it” enough to be familiar with Soul Eater, but here is a photo of the scene that was used.

Here is the vector drawing that was created to use as a pattern.

Here is what the finished pumpkin looked like. The open areas provide the brightest light. The shaved away areas allow some light to be seen for a mid-value. The skin areas are opaque, so those areas remain dark.

Here is what the finished pumpkin looked like when lit up.

We took things another step forward and scanned the pumpkin using the handheld 3D scanner that the Mechanical Engineering Technology folks at K-State Polytechnic recently acquired. The scanner creates a model that can be used for 3D printing.

Here is the scanned pumpkin

Here is the creator of the pumpkin, Kyler Besher. Nice work, Kyler!

See more of our pumpkin carving work on our Flickr site.

One of the things that has caused me a bit of confusion while working with Unity3D is object rotation. I was working on a small project today in which I was trying to build a four-walled building using C# code. I knew how to build a wall out of cubes using a nested “for” loop. But trying to rotate the objects 90 degrees so I could build four walls, it took me a while to figure out. Back in my days of working with Flash, you simply set the rotation property to the degrees you wanted it to rotate. But that was a 2-D environment. Unity has 3 dimensions, so rotation is more complicated.

To rotate 90 degrees, I found this example from Instantiate a Rotated Object.

Instantiate (object, position, Quaternion.Euler(0, 90, 0));

So it is similar to doing a rotation in Flash, only you have to tell it the axis to rotate on. In the above example, the object is rotated 90 degrees about the y axis, exactly what I was trying to do. I was able to build four walls using this tidbit.

Last week my wife Wendy & I saw the Tim McGraw and Faith Hill concert in Wichita, KS. This might sound like a pretty ordinary thing since people go to concerts all the time, but for us it was a special night. We’ve been married 24 years, and I can’t think of one concert we’ve been to that was similar to this one.

Our tickets came courtesy of Vettix.org, an organization that provides free tickets to active duty service members and veterans. According to the website…

Vet Tix provides tickets to events which reduce stress, strengthen family bonds, build life-long memories and encourage service members and veterans to stay engaged with local communities and American life.

I would say that in my case, it did just that. Because we have made the choice that mom would stay at home instead of working at a job while we raise kids, money has always been tight for us. Going to expensive entertainment venues just doesn’t happen much.

I also commute to work every day over an hour’s drive each way because we live in a rural area of Kansas. This means attending something like a concert is going to require some extra effort just to make it happen. Wichita is more than an hour beyond where I work, so the day of the concert, Wendy met me at work, and we continued on from there.

Our tickets were “will call” which I wasn’t familiar with the process, but it meant we had to arrive early and pick up our tickets at the box office. Our information said the doors opened an hour before showtime, so we arrived about 15 minutes after the doors opened. I was afraid there would be a long line to get our tickets, and another long line to get into the show. But it worked out that we got right in to get our tickets, and once we had our tickets, we’d already passed through security so we didn’t have to wait in line again.

We ate a bite of fast food through a drive-through on the way there, because we didn’t know what our options would be once we arrived. We laughed when we got inside the InTrust Bank Arena and it was like a ball game environment with dozens of vendors were there.

The concert was a little bit like when you show up at the movies for announced showtime, and you have to sit through half an hour of ads and previews. The show was scheduled to start at 7:30, but I recall the opener didn’t take the stage until around 7:50.

Somewhere around 8:30-something, Tim & Faith finally took the stage. Oh, the lights and sounds, so large that you could feel it in your bones. It honestly felt like more of a rock concert than country. I looked and looked, but couldn’t find the tour bassist’s name. He was one of the most entertaining people I saw on stage. Totally into it; he rocked the entire show.

The whole thing was very  theatrical. The laser lights reminded me of the time I went to see Yes: Big Generator in concert in Tokyo. But this show was even bigger than that one, mostly because of new media that is available.

Video was a big part of the show. Some of it showed up on automated scrims that lowered and raised, and arranged themselves in different patterns to show video and video effects.

Other video showed up on the big screen behind the stage. We were sitting so far forward in the auditorium, it was hard for us to see much on that big screen.

But we were close to the performers. At times, really close, like in this picture of Faith Hill taken on an iPhone.

She was right there by us, and almost everyone had their phone out. Early on, I decided that the quality of my photos and videos wouldn’t be much to write home about, so I planned to put the phone away for most of the evening and enjoy the show. But when she came up right near where we were sitting, I had to try to get some kind of photo. I’m glad I did.

It was a great concert, and a wonderful date night out with my wife, something that is far too rare. It was very memorable and I thank the Vettix people so much for making this happen.

Today’s Daily Create asked us to pose for a super power selfie. Well, anyone who knows me well, knows that my superpower is super-intelligence. I use my genetically-enhanced brain to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting population.

Yesterday’s Daily Create called for juxtaposition of old with new. As a starting point, it gave us some old Japanese & Chinese prints to work with.

I selected the above print, and used Photoshop to add in something new, the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. The assignment offered “extra Internet points” for animating it, so I did that as well.

To animate an object in photoshop, I enabled the timeline. I pasted in the carrier on a new layer, after cutting it out with a selection made using the pen tool. I pasted it on to the post card. On the post card, I also cut out some of the foreground scenery and pasted it onto the topmost layer, allowing the aircraft carrier to sail in the background.

Using the timeline, I created new frames, and moved the carrier a bit to the left on each frame. My gif uses ten frames of animation. Once it was all completed, I saved using the export for web feature, saving it as an animated gif.

It is a tradition at our school to celebrate the beginning of a new school year with a workshop for the staff and faculty. Frequently referred to as an inservice day, ours is affectionately known as the “Fall Kickoff.” I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about what I learned at ours yesterday.

1. We went over the new policies at K-State regarding concealed-carry on campus. Yes, you read that right. In the state of Kansas, anyone over the age of 21 (with certain restrictions such as no criminal record) can carry a concealed handgun on campus. While concealed carry training is recommended, there is no law mandating such training.
   • Because of how our state law is written, the only permitted weapon on campus are handguns. Other weapons such as BB guns, blowguns, nun-chucks, etc. are not permitted.
2. My friend and colleague Troy Harding, recipient of the Rex McArthur Family Faculty Fellow Award, spoke to us about the experience of working with teachers from the Junction City area on a technology education grant. He was inspired by their enthusiasm for and dedication to teaching. I hope to connect with these (and other great teachers from our region) hopefully through Twitter and #ksedchat. I used to be more involved in Twitter-based chats with teachers, and want to get back into that.
3. We saw a fascinating video about Don Norman and his theory on emotional design. I wasn’t familiar with him before. I’m really interested in his ideas, and want to read some of his books now. See that video here:
   
4. We toured all of the Aviation areas on our campus and learned about their degree programs. Among other things, I got to fly a drone and I saw the equipment for learning electricity/electronics in the aviation maintenance lab. I teach a week on basic electricity. These things could make a great lab for my students to try their hand at making basic circuits.
5. 

Overall, it was a relevant day. Throughout the year, we are going to become familiar with all of the degrees offered on our campus. It was a good start to a new year!

Yesterday I attended the Kansas State University shindig recognizing this year’s promoted faculty. We have some amazing people working at this place. There were professors hailing from all over the world. Everyone was from somewhere else, it seemed, and I think that’s pretty normal in academia. It’s not very prestigious for everyone to be home-grown.

But I was there too. A Marysville High School graduate, from just up the road to K-State. A military veteran, recruited out of Manhattan, KS. A Cloud County Community College graduate among scholars from MIT and Harvard. And yes, proudly a graduate of, with my final degree earned at Kansas State University.

Doesn’t it seem just a little bit strange that I was the stranger there, the odd one, being the Kansas native with the background I have? But there I was, a professor at K-State. So happy, and so proud to be serving the people of the state that I call home – Kansas.