Andrew Nicolaou
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Week 5

February 2015—February 2015

This is a post about weeknotes.

Sprint planning

Organised some sprint planning for the team, following on from the year planning in previous weeks. Used the same big bit of paper to check our progress and make sure we're on the right track.

Workshops

Some workshops with colleagues in R&D to find out more about their soon-to-be-standardised TV sync technology. It gave us the opportunity to think through some scenarios we've been thinking about for an EU collaborative project about multi-device experiences.

Playlister-Follow

Continued with the radio prototype from last week. Spent a day using an Espruino to hook up a rotary encoder and LEDs . You can turn the encoder and the LEDs light up in order. It communicates via an simple serial protocol along the USB cable to the radio app running on the laptop. Hooked this into the app via socket.io so that the web UI was synchronised to the physical UI. I think these sorts of synchronised realtime experiences are really, really important. The Espruino is a fantastic prototyping tool, getting all of that working took less than a couple of hours and because it's all JavaScript there's the possibility of copy and pasting code between platforms.

I wanted to complete the other side of the synchronisation—turning the correct LED on when someone used the web UI. This was trickier since by default, all text sent along the USB cable is parsed by the Espruino javascript interpreter. You can disable this I think but I couldn't quite get it to work. I ended up creating a method called handleMessage(pinNum) in the Espruino and then sending the text handleMessage(8) from the laptop to the Espruino, which had the same effect.

Manchester

Spent a couple of days at the R&D North Lab at Media City UK, re-visiting an installation that Libby, Jasmine and I made.

Footsteps

Artist Daniel Jones published a blog post of the sound project he worked on at a recent workshop Dan Nuttall and I hosted a few months. It's a really promising way of showcasing the amazing metadata search systems that aren't audience-facing but are essential for production.