My previous drawing robots have a very simple mechansim for holding markers—either a series of holes on Minus E or a tube on Scribbot. There was also no lifting mechanism, as my robots’ scribbly drawing style did not require it. This year, inspired by the pen-holding mechansim on pen plotters, I decided to add a similar mechansim to my drawing robot.

This week, I am experimenting with RESTful web microservices. I set up an nginx server block at https://api.jbd.lol. I wrote a Node.js script based on Tom Igoe’s NodeWithNginx to provide three microservices.

This week, I am continuing my network experiment with an Nginx setup on my AWS E2C virtual machine. I followed How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 to install nginx and How To Secure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 20.04 to get my free TLS/SSL certificate. The default Nginx page is currently available at http://100.26.63.206/ and it will most certainly become unavailable if you are reading this post more than a couple of months later. In addition, I set up two server blocks for https://hi.jbd.lol/ (with TLS/SSL certificate) and http://ad.jbd.lol/ (without TLS/SSL certificate), which are also likely to go away later, depending on whether or not I decide to keep the jbd.lol domain next year. Furthermore, I have an A Record pointing www.ad.jbd.lol to the IP same address as http://ad.jbd.lol/, and I have an URL Redirect Record pointing www.hi.jbd.lol to https://hi.jbd.lol.

In the Understanding Networks class this week, Tom Igoe showed the class the Ball Drop Game. In Tom’s own words, the Ball Drop Game is “a multiplayer game in which players collaborate to keep a ball from hitting the ground”. To play this game, all players need to be on the same network as the game, which is a networked application written in Processing. When we played it for the first time, we all connected to the game using the netcat utility via a command line interface. The netcat utility established TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connections from our laptops to Tom’s laptop, where the Ball Drop Game server application was running.

This week, I’m exploring the paths of my network transactions using the traceroute utility. I started with the websites that I visit most regularly, such as google.com and instagram.com. I wasn’t sure what I would do to analyze the traceroute outputs, so I decided to take screenshots of every website that I traced. Here are a couple of examples:

As a part of the first assignment for the Understanding Networks course at ITP, I set up an Internet host using Amazon Web Services (AWS). On the AWS EC2 Dashboard, I created a virtual server instance from one of the preconfigured Amazon Machine Images named ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd-gp3/ubuntu-noble-24.04-amd64-server-20240801. I noticed that the IP address changes after every reboot, so I went ahead and created an elastic IP to assign it to my virtual server instance. Finally, I have an Internet host with a persistent IP address, which I can conveniently access via an SSH client from my computer.

[ Try Bug Musicans ]

This series of experiments started with something completely unrelated to music. I remember seeing ragdoll characters commonly used in video games and artworks either to invoke a surreal feeling or for a comedic effect. I wanted to try implementing it in p5.js with the help of a physics library.

[ Try Mouth Synth | View source code on GitHub ]

In my previous experiments, I integrated hand pose detection in my sketch. Hand-driven interaction feels magical, but also somewhat conventional. For this new series, I wanted to try something less conventional—mouth-driven interaction.

At ITP, I took a class called Paper Enginnering and Interactive Play with Sam Ita. I was very excited to experiment with paper. Paper is such a ubiquitous medium, yet often overlooked.

For this series, I wanted to create a simple interface for “drawing” melodies on the screen. I started with a mouse interaction where clicking and dragging the mouse drew a sequence of linked nodes along the path of the cursor movement. It worked much like how you would expect any drawing app to work. The melody would start playing as soon as you release your mouse. The nodes were sequentially highlighted as their corresponding notes were played.

In this series of experiments, I started with very basic algorithmically-generated rhythms coupled with simple visual elements.

While we were exchanging ideas of what we could do with Tone.js and p5.js, Henry Chen came up with this idea of a node-based system for interacting with music in a virtual 3D environment, in which moving one node could simultaneously affect multiple other nodes that affect the music. We agreed that creating a 2D version first could serve as a very good starting point.

For the past two years, I have been doing lots of computational sketches that focused on visuals. This year, I am enrolled in a graduate course at ITP called the Code of Music, taught by Luisa Pereira. I finally ran out of excuses for not experimenting with sound.

Back in 2017, I built my first mobile drawing robot for my undergraduate capstone at NYU Shanghai. Some of my design choices at the time were constrained by the resources and timeline. Now that I am back in school, pursing my master’s degree, I wanted to redesign the robot. My main goal was to make the robot smaller so it becomes more portable. I also thought this would be a nice challenge to practice my CAD skills and deepen my understanding of the electronics.

Inspired by 18th-century automatons such as the writer and the draughtsman by Jaquet-Droz, I wanted to create my own drawing automatons. In particular, I am hoping to build more accessible drawing automatons with a focus on enhanced programmability. As a first step, I decided to design a mechansim for drawing scribbly lines.

Yaogu, also known as the Waist Drum dance, is a traditional folk dance popular in my hometown region of Northern Shaanxi, China. Having lived away from my hometown for over a decade, I wanted to create something that would remind me of my fonding memories there.

For the graduate course, Introduction to Fabrication, that I took at Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), I spent a few weeks learning and experimenting with a variety of fabrication machines, tools, and materials. I embraced an iterative approach to fabrication and integrated computational techniques into my process. Here are all my experiments, each linked to its respective post:

I have always wanted to experiment with wood joinery and I finally decided that this is the week. During my research, I stumbled upon this interactive wood joint design system and wanted to create something similar in p5.js.

I was tasked to create an enclosure and I thought it would be fun to design an enclosure with an organic exterior. I wanted to continue exploring computational design approaches, so I started sketching in p5.js.

This week, I have been experimenting with laser engraving. I wanted to continue incorporating computational thinking into my process, so the first thing I thought of was to create a p5.js sketch for the laser engraver. Although raster files can be used for etching, I think it would be more interesting to generate a vector path for the laser engraver.

I have been making and posting daily creative coding experiments (on my Instagram) for almost 2 years now. One of the mathematical functions that keep coming back is a sine function (such as in the sketch below, which utilizes a combination of sine and cosine functions). As I have been studying fabrication techniques and mechanical movements recently, I had this idea of creating an automaton that visualizes a sine wave.

This week, we are studying the movements of our mechanical toys. The first step we were asked to do was to draw all components in Adobe Illustrator. Since I am fairly familiar with Adobe Illustrator, I challenged myself to practice drawing in Vectorworks, which I have little experience in.

Introduction to Fabrication is a 7-week course that I am taking at ITP. While I have already had some experience with fabrication, I think, as I embark on my graduate journey at ITP, this will be a good introduction to the specific tools and machines that are available at the prototyping shop here. I also see this as a great opportunity to experiment, fail, and experiment again, a lot!

This year, I am starting a new chapter of my life as a graduate student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at Tisch School of Arts, New York University. As I pursue my graduate studies here, I will be sharing lots of updates on this blog. One of the courses that I am taking is called Fabricating Mechanical Automatons *Batteries Not Included.