I told myself I’d publish/share my garden software once everything was running smoothly, and I had added all the features I wanted to add on the first version. Well, everyone says that, and that’s why it’s hard to find introductory, simple stuff sometimes: everyone has done it but does not feel like it’s special enough to warrant sharing it.

I am very certain that my software is not special. It is not even original, not at all. And I am a little nervous about how to allocate credit (as I would hate to take credit for the work when in fact I only very slightly modified the work of many others). Nevertheless, here it is:

Arduino-to-Pachube firmware for v1 of AKA Garden system: AKA_pachube_only_client_v3_release1

This software has been tested to work with an Arduino Diecimila (although I don’t know why any other Arduino board that can take a shield wouldn’t also work) and the v2 Arduino Ethernet board. I had a terrible, terrible time trying to get LadyAda’s older Ethernet shield working (the one with a Lantronix XPort Direct+ chipset), and I recommend you just get the newer boards with the Wiznet module. I say this because I spent about 40 hours trying to get success with the old board, and if I had instead gone outside and looked for coins I would only have had to find about a dollar an hour to make it worthwhile to just buy the new board…

The garden setup has been up and running for more than a week now with zero downtime, so I feel OK about the reliability of the circuit and the code. Next steps are:

More sensors (I am now trying to develop a low-cost, perpetually-embeddable pH sensor, as these don’t exist for under a couple thousand dollars)

Code that posts to my own database, rather than just posting to Pachube (I would like to have more features than Pachube offers for free, such as infinite-resolution histories, different graph options, and infinite streams)

Code that allows for actuation as well as datalogging; for example, to trigger a drain cycle on the system, take a photo, or adjust the lights

The Garden page has a slideshow of all my Flickr photos with the “garden” tag, and if you browse to the most recent photos you can see the physical setup of the board, shields, and sensors.

I tried hard to comment all my code and make everything intelligible, but it’s my first time letting code out into the wild so I bet I messed it up. Hit up the comments if you have questions or want help!

Next up, I will calibrate the thermistor and determine a conversion function between mV on the analog pin and degrees Celsius; since I can’t think of too many downsides of just having a relative (unconverted) measure of light exposure, I’m going to leave that channel as it is.

In other news, I’m just returning from many days without internet or cellphone in New Hampshire—heaven. In the meantime, though, the garden lost two of its three gallons of solution to evaporation, and as a result most of the plants are not doing very well. Both regular and Thai basil plants are done for, unfortunately, and the just-planted cucumbers aren’t looking very healthy. Ironically, even if I had set the Pachube system up before leaving, and if I had had the foresight to rig up a water-level sensor (one is coming soon…), I still would have messed up the garden, because Pachube can only really access me by cell or over the internet. This was, of course, one great thing about being up there, but also a reason to start thinking about onboard logic: what if the system could have refilled itself, solving its own problem? More to come on that soon.

I have my doubts about the mechanical efficiency of the system I am using. It has two tiny air stones at the bottom that both oxygenate and circulate the nutrient solution. However, in practice I can see that very little circulation takes place. In a test, I half-emptied the system and refilled it with a new nutrient solution (whose light-red color made it easy to differentiate from the existing solution in the bed). I poured the entire gallon of solution in one corner—the airstones run down the center of the bed, so one corner is the same as any other—after five minutes the new solution had barely moved at all.

pH monitoring has also revealed some complications that may be impeding plant growth. It has been difficult to keep the acidity of the solution down to a normal level, which I didn’t initially think would be an issue. (Not that I didn’t think there wouldn’t be issues—I just anticipated wild swings in either direction, rather than a persistent acid problem…) I’ve posted the readings in a graph below; will Google Docs be smart enough to update it every time I add a new reading? We’ll have to see. I intend eventually to use my server to publish these graphs without needing Google.

These considerations spur me to two actions: to increase the size of the system (in order to better dampen it from shocks like the introduction of new nutrient solution), and to change its main method of circulation to flood-and-drain. This will involve sourcing two larger grow beds and installing them one over the other, much like this arrangement. Flood-drain will, I hope, circulate solution much more efficiently and get more oxygen to the roots. It is also convenient that flood-drain is also the eventual system we’d like to have running when we try adding an aquaculture element to the system.

I have also added a grow light to the setup, and have (but have not yet set up) a large solar panel and charge controller. More about these next time.

More details soon.[Gallery]

Andrew2.0 and I have been working on building our own RepStrap for the last three or four weekends, and last night we had a very successful first run (without the extruder installed). Above, you can see a video of it in action. (Thanks for the FlipHD, Dad!). We made some initial measurements of its alignment and were pleasantly surprised to find that the X and Y axes are just about perfectly square to each other, and even with our hardware-store threaded rod we seem to be getting accuracy to about 0.02mm(!)

We’re assembling and mounting the extruder head tonight, so by early next week we should be printing in ABS for real. It’s pretty addictive building these, partially because it’s awesome to build something that is so much more accurate than a person can be.

While I was working on House In Bali in Berkeley, I had the thought that it would be a good idea to run some video signal through a steak. It was mostly the drawing I had made of the signal flow, and the name (“Steak Filter”) that I thought were so simple and adorably right. I am hard to dissuade when I insist something is right, even if I am clearly wrong; you might already know this. I got excited about it, and ended up not talking about much else for a day or so. I think I was pretty insufferable about it being a good thing to try.

Just last week, I finally got it together enough to just do a dry run, and I’m glad I did—somehow I never remember how easy it is to just throw something together, or how little I ever regret spending an hour or an evening to throw together a little test that will leave me with some digital or physical records to work with.

I meant to tell you about this sooner, because I liked the result. The actual mechanics of the filter worked really well, better than I thought, and it made for a nice contemplative couple hours, watching the steak (it was a roast, actually) cooking. Almost as soon as I put it up on Vimeo, I got an email from an editor at a food blog called “Eat Me Daily.” Not, if you ask me, a great name for a blog, but they had some cool work there. Raphael, the editor, asked me “exactly what’s going on here.”

This was exciting, because it was a chance to put an actual artwork into the world with a statement accompanying it. I’m glad I thought a bit ahead, though, and asked him to hold off publishing for a day or so while I got my website updated and generally cleaned house and prepared for visitors. Using Google Wave, Harlo and I co-edited the text of the statement and sent it off. Here’s the statement:

Hi Raphael, thanks for your patience – there’s now a (hopefully) more coherent web representation of the project online.

I think the >init< video is perhaps the most explanatory: http://vimeo.com/7491585 , although the green-and-red video you referenced does look a little nicer (both are from the same performance event). Quite literally, I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.

With this performance I'm trying to get at the reflexivity of live video - the taut line between the space and the image that results. It's possible to think of almost anything that mediates as a filter of some kind...sort of a "the-map-is-not-the-territory" territory.

In this system, the filtered image is recursively processed in a feedback loop, allowing minute perturbations to ripple and echo across the screen long after the original impulse has ended.

Part of my interest in video lies in its exploded body; the signal is a ghost that resonates and deforms, trapped in our waveguides: when the system powers down the image fades into incoherence, leaving no corpse behind. Steak Filter gives body to this infinite recursion, making it real; incarnate. With this corporeality comes mortality: as the meat sputters and pops, we watch the cascade of images until finally, the steak is done.

This piece was a study for a performance series I might be doing at the Harvard Museum of Natural History this spring. I'd love to hear any thought/feedback/reactions, etc you might have - thanks!

After I sent that off, Raphael wrote back with some questions, which I’ll post verbatim:

Hi Raphael, thanks for your questions! I’ll do my best to answer these well but please feel free to push me for clarification or more details…

You write “the signal is a ghost” — is part of what you’re capturing the last remaining life of the animal, right before its consumption? Its “last gasp” so to speak. Is the meat itself a ghost?

It’s not particularly about the life/soul of the animal – meat is meat. For me, the ghost I mention is the fissure between the physical and virtual realms involved in the performance – a real space is abstracted, ghosted, into a temporal phenomenon (the video signal) that we see as a series of transient images onscreen. There’s no way to “catch” this live signal, but you can see its traces.

Was there a reason to use beef over other meats?

It was very important for this project not to be wasteful, both out of respect for the medium and due to financial limitations – I asked a couple butchers for spoiled/unwanted steaks, but nobody would provide any. Often, a title is one of the first elements I’ll start with when making a piece, and “Steak Filter” has a compelling ring to it. Also, I don’t really eat pork, and I was worried chicken or fish would not present an easily-readable image onscreen.

How will your upcoming performance series incorporate this study?

I’m not entirely sure yet, but I will probably be doing this performance, cooking a steak filter, while the audience explores the rest of the works on display. The smell, and the amplified sound of the sputtering of the meat, will provide an interesting ambient counterpoint to the museum’s usual fare of sterile, long-dead, never-changing objects. (There is no sound in some of the videos this time because I did not have the proper mic setup)

How did it taste?

It was delicious. I might experiment with different marinades, though, to see their effect on the image and palette. There is something special, though, to the simplicity of the current setup.

Have you worked with food before?

I have done a few poorly-documented projects in the past, like signing my name using a pen that dispenses a rapidly-solidifying “gummi” mix. I am working on a piece now that involves custom-molded chocolate circuitry, although it is too soon to tell if that idea will bear
fruit.

also, please confirm: the official name of the piece is “Steak Filter v0″ and should be credited to Noah Feehan / AKA MEDIA SYSTEM

Thanks for asking! This is version 0 of the “Steak Filter” series, so “Steak Filter (v0)” or “Steak Filter, v0″ would be fine. I’m Noah
Feehan / AKA. AKA MEDIA SYSTEM is a term I use to include any collaborators and/or participants, but this piece is pretty much solo.

I just couldn’t be more pleased with Raphael’s write-up here. I was a little worried when I saw the “is this about the animal’s soul” part, as it looked a little like a leading question, but it turned out fine—I think that by providing a strong set of responses and a clearly-written statement, it became easier to tell my story than to do the usual conjecture/opinion that often accompanies reblogged web art.

Raphael’s piece really took off after a few hours, which was super-exciting. First it was on kottke, then Gizmodo, then Lady Ada’s blog, then Today and Tomorrow. Overall, I got 14400 views in about 3 days. And this was a test shot, done on Friday night, more or less because I had nothing better to do.

The thing I learned is, this is the better thing that I have to do. The more I spend a couple hours doing a lil thing like this, or making Mylar Mountains, or making little chocolate circuitboards, the more something good is likely to happen.

Jessica’s talk had some very interesting AV components. At one point, she played a great series of audio samples with accompanying waveplots. I was a little underwhelmed by her engagement with the technical side of her work—maybe she was nervous, but it seemed at times as though she was deliberately trying to sound “technical,” something that makes me immediately suspicious.

Much of Jessica’s talk was about the change in technology from the 1960′s to the present: transistors are smaller, memory is bigger, and the like. It didn’t relate much to anything else, except that it was an interest of hers, which I suppose we did all show up to listen to…at a couple points she used the strange example of cars to compare to the progress that computers have made: cars still do the same thing, cost about the same, run on gas, etc. More than a few people in the (mostly MIT-student) audience looked as confused as I that we were making this comparison.

I’m aware that I’m not saying much that’s positive about Jessica, even though I admire what she’s doing and how she got here. I’m a little puzzled myself as to why I’m dwelling on the negative aspects, and I think the distinction is dawning on me: Jessica Rylan is a good maker of things, and is firmly interested in the dialog surrounding her work. She has a rich relationship to the equipment she uses and the sound she makes (her website is very well-spoken), and is admirably open and involved in helping others have the same experience. Of course, the other side of all of this is that I really don’t care for her actual music—it appears as though she has taken to describing herself as a “noise band” because of the current cachet surrounding this genre, since her music rarely shares the qualities of other groups in that genre.

Altogether, the presentation didn’t go very well. Ms. Rylan’s prepared notes weren’t thorough or focused, and her remarks didn’t really get at the ideas behind her process and her music. Perhaps the entire audience would have been better served if he had made a clear decision either to discuss her artistic intent and motivation or to delve into the technical aspects of her hardware fabrication and setup, rather than paying lip-service to both. I’ve seen from this talk how someone who is otherwise in control of her direction and practice can make the mistake of showing work that is either poorly contextualized or, worse, attempting to capitalize on an audience’s lack of understanding rather than add to such an understanding.

I’ve held off on releasing this post for several months for a couple of reasons, and I’m glad to revisit it, especially since the project I’m working on now has put me in much the same situation: several times in the recent past, I’ve been compelled to “tech it up” when discussing my project with sponsors, press, or visitors. It’s amazing the kind of hyperbolic bullshit one can concoct when watching a sponsor’s interest in your professor’s opera flag before your eyes.

However, these experiences have only strengthened my resolve to be more open when discussing my own work, which hopefully will be soon (Sponsor Week is at the end of October, and I expect to have one or two projects of my own ready to show by then).

The application
The application is in, and all necessary evaluators have responded. Hopefully, my application is as good as anyone else’s at this point. I am satisfied with my submission, and glad that it is out of my hands.

The Cameroon project
Delightfully, I met Andrew Sempere again recently and he has offered some insight on the chip problem I am having—the one I’m working with is proving difficult to debug. I’ve been working with Harlo on using this power source and looking at other chips that more easily facilitate pitchshifting. I’m considering just gutting this helmet and using it for a cheap pitchshift effect (I assume it can be hacked to change pitches).

The Syncwalk Digital Composition Interface
I’m chomping at the bit to get to the hardware/software part of this but I have committed to do the Cameroon project first. It’s nice, though, to continue to try to refine the operational flow as a background task while walking. I have a pretty complete model in mind now, and it can be implemented in several stages, which will help focus development work along the way.

South Africa Documentary
I’m heading down to New York to finalize the scored parts of Thenji Nkosi’s documentary at the end of the month—there’s also a new song called “Primary Loyalty” that you can hear here:
Primary Loyalty

Screen printing
Harlo and started screen printing this past weekend and had some modest successes.

A Bell
I received a very lovely bell for Christmas and it makes a wonderful sound. I will link to it soon.