IDLE HANDS

After watching lady Ada’s information about the bedazzler I went on a porting spree. But first a little something about “the bedazzler” in case you don’t care to read up on the link. The US Dept. of Homeland Security has spent 1 million dollars on creating a “sea-sick flashlight” that they intend to use as a riot control device. It’s non-lethal and it’s better for the environment then teargas.

Lady Ada’s device is an open source clone of the Dazzler dubbed “the Bedazzler” funny I though, but spending 250 dollars getting your friends and family sick was not really going to happen. But then one night I had the idea to port the bedazzler to an Android device. That was pretty easy since processing.org released a test-beta that could make Android applications, otherwise I’d spend that evening installing Eclipse and swearing. Anyways I made it, and a video of it is is here:

Anyways, It worked in the Android emulator, got me sick so I had to go to bed 🙂 funny, but It does not work on the device, to low frame rate I think. Here’s the source if you are wanting to test it. Please note that you’re probably going to get sick. Here’s a direct link to the applet. Don’t send your friends here!

Then I thought, I want a mobile version, and I do have a blinkM that I have not used for anything yet. the blinkM is a RGB led with a microprocessor. First of I did what every sane person would do. I hooked up the blinkM to an Arduino and ported the code once more to suit the current platform. Here’s the source for that. Somewhat efficient. Here’s a video of it:

I also wanted to create a standalone version, since you can upload code to the blinkM and run it without an Arduino. There I ran into some trouble. The time slots on the blinkM is a divided by 33 milliseconds, so the lowest I can go is 33ms between blinks, and then 66 and then 99. I made the port anyways (that was so simple I didn’t even save the source), but It has no effect on me at all, here’s a video:

Now I’m going to see if I can make a device that does the opposite.