Author: pauloricca

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada Love­la­ce deve­lo­ped the first pie­ce of soft­ware in his­tory, for Char­les Bab­ba­ge’s early mecha­ni­cal gene­ral-pur­po­se com­pu­ter, the analy­ti­cal engi­ne; she’s, the­re­fo­re, the world’s first soft­ware pro­gram­mer! Today is Ada Love­la­ce Day and we are cele­bra­ting women in tech­no­lo­gi­cal fields.

Here at Altlab we have a strong femi­ni­ne influ­en­ce sin­ce two of our foun­ders are awe­so­mely extra­or­di­nary techy women!

Cata­ri­na Mota

Cata­ri­na is a bit our de fac­to lea­der, gluing us all together with her incre­di­ble ten­der­ness and for­ced volun­te­e­ring skills. Her main inte­rests and topics of rese­ar­ch are com­pu­ter visi­on, intel­li­gent mate­ri­als, hac­kers­pa­ces and per­so­nal fabri­ca­ti­on. Cata­ri­na got her Mas­ter degree in New York Uni­ver­sity’s Inte­rac­ti­ve Tele­com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons Pro­gram whe­re she spe­ci­a­li­zed in phy­si­cal com­pu­ting and inte­rac­ti­ve ins­tal­la­ti­ons. Besi­des AltLab, she’s one of the foun­ders and main writ­ters of http://openmaterials.org/. She’s also an acti­ve mem­ber of Thin­gi­ver­se and her “things” and pro­ce­du­ral 3d model­ling are prai­sed by just about everyo­ne, check it out http://www.thingiverse.com/catarina!

Móni­ca Mendes

Móni­ca (the blon­de acro­ba­tic mon­key suit) is our char­ming radi­cal sur­fer foun­der! When she’s not hac­king her own Ran­ge Rover she’s busy wor­king with real-time video ins­tal­la­ti­ons on a pro­ject cal­led RTi­VISS http://www.rtiviss.com/ whi­ch is the basis of her PhD. She is also an inter­fa­ce desig­ner and a mul­ti­me­dia educator.

Make your own game-pad!

…Don’t let others tell you how many but­tons you can press at once, the­se are times of freedom 🙂

This is a home­ma­de game-pad with just one acce­le­ro­me­ter (a bre­a­kout board from Spark­fun) and one push-button.

custom game-pad with accelerometer and push-button connected to arduino

Using a sim­ple, cus­tom pro­to­col and a C# lis­te­ner we could play Acce­le­roids, an Aste­roids lost sibling on Ste­roids, whi­ch uses the acce­le­ro­me­ter to con­trol the ship and the but­ton to shoot.

next steps will be to turn this into a gene­ric game-pad by simu­la­ting key­bo­ard key pres­ses for any sen­sor you throw at the Ardui­no, allowing you to cre­a­te truly funky pads to con­trol your favou­ri­te game. Stay tuned! 😉

Edit: We were aler­ted by fri­en­dly com­ments that this pro­ject resem­bles another project/tutorial that can be found here: http://lusorobotica.com/index.php/topic,902.0.html