I’ve been craving to learn how to utilize sensors, actuators, controller boards, and osc to build some interactive environments (post-robotic-ecologies-trauma). Suspecting that most of these products would be made in China anyways and that they’d be quite cheap, my friend and I have started to explore the world of Zhong Guan Cun. We ran into a few stores that specialize in making sensors and circuit boards. We spent about $10. We now have about a hundred LEDs, an infrared sensor, a photosensor, and etc -_-b

It wasn’t easy getting a controller board that we could burn customized program on to. Luckily, we got in touch with an IBM engineer that builds Arduino boards for hobby. So, now the experiment begins :)

last weekend, we had a deadline for the xiamen project. we didn’t sleep for maybe two nights. intense but the best times :)

the project is finally ready…. props to my team for all the hard work. the project was approved by the client and is moving forward!

here’s a few images from the final booklet.

me + wangwei

wangwei and meiling

joao in tokyo + dave in xiamen. cranking renders

mat. germans cad on beer -_-b

koreans cad on tea, coffee, and energy drinks

must pingpong

sunrise

good morning. spider :P

few hours before the flight to xiamen.

I think Beijing is probably one of the most exciting places to be especially for architecture. These pictures speak for themselves. Pure craziness..

beijing olympic village

the bird’s nest

inside the nest

inside the water cube

close up of the voronoi structures

CCTV almost touching

cladding

closer view of the structure

all pics by dave nightingale.

the entire beijing is in construction. even at night times. this city never sleeps -_-v i’m not really sure why, but i’m starting like dark/black images with high-contrast-colors..

guijie. ghost street.

hutong pizza. best pizza in beijing.

chuan. symbol for xijiang style skewers.

quik. chinese seven eleven.

mai dang lao. md under construction.

coffee salon. my favorite coffee shop in beijing :)

di tie. new subway line for the olympic.

a homeless lives in the forbidden city.

update on xm. hmmm. maybe a little too much..

If the tower you’re designing is super curvy and if none of your floor plates are shaped the same, it becomes really hard to transfer the geometry into construction. One of the most basic information that the builders need is coordinates from different areas of the building. The more organic the design, the more points you’ll have to provide them in order for the actual structure to come close to what you designed. aka. This can take forever.

So here’s a little script that will do this for you. This is actually the first rhinoscript I wrote :P  First it’ll ask you to choose a base point. The coordinates of the other points will be calculated using the base point as (0,0,0).

Sub CoordinatesBasePoint

Dim baseObject
baseObject = Rhino.GetPoint(“Select base point to be set as (0,0,0)”)
If IsNull(baseObject) Then Exit Sub

Dim arrObjects
arrObjects = Rhino.GetObjects(“Select points to calculate coordinates”, 1, True, True)
If Not IsArray(arrObjects) Then Exit Sub

Dim arrPoint0, arrVector, arrPoint3
arrPoint0 = Array(0,0,0)
arrVector = Rhino.VectorCreate(baseObject, arrPoint0)

Dim strObject, arrPoint, arrPoint2
For Each strObject In arrObjects
arrPoint = Rhino.PointCoordinates(strObject)
arrPoint2 = Rhino.PointSubtract(arrPoint, arrVector)
Rhino.AddTextDot Rhino.Pt2Str(arrPoint2, 3), arrPoint
Next

End Sub

CoordinatesBasePoint

When I first started to learn how to script in mel, I had the hardest time trying to figure out the length of a spline curve. This is super easy, when a line is composed of purely straight lines. But, when a curve starts to bend, it gets extremely complicated. I wanted to understand exactly how a curve was shaped based on its degree and control points. I ran into good amount of websites and journals that explain spline curves with math formulas. I never figured out how to find out a curve length using script through pure math. However, I ended up learning a lot about spline curves, and this was probably the most helpful article that I ran into: Arc Length Parameterization of Spline Curves.

After a while of trying to figure this thing out, I found out about the arc length tool -__- And, also found a script that extracts the measurement from the arc length node. I modified the script a tiny bit and made it into a function, which looks like this:

proc float getCurveLength( string $curve )
{
string $arcLenNode = `createNode arcLengthDimension`;
connectAttr -f ( $curve + “.worldSpace[0]” ) ( $arcLenNode + “.nurbsGeometry” );

setAttr ( $arcLenNode + “.uParamValue” ) `getAttr ( $curve + “.maxValue” )`;

float $curveLength = `getAttr ( $arcLenNode + “.arcLength” )`;

string $parent[] = `listRelatives -p $arcLenNode`;
delete $parent;

return $curveLength;
}