Greetings from Portland !   We arrived late last night. Woke early to start start my work day.. Soem good meetigns today.. including one where I’m helping arrange a Fulbright teaching gig  at UVM for my good friend Selim . Selim was one of 8 year old twins whose family I lived with when I was n exchange student in Austria in 1979 (!). he’s now the head of the Industrial Design department at the Volkshochschule Wiener Neustadt. Looks like we”re goign to be able to make that happen next fall (?).

When Gabe got home from school  we headed to Hopscotch  a new interactive experience zone in Portland. It’s an amazing interactive tech/art  venue. As we were getting there  our good friend  Tucker and his GF Hailey were just coming out. It was great seeing them. Hailey lost an earing in teh ball pit (ball pit ?!) we took a picture to see if we could find it. 

Hopscotch is beautifully laid out.. your guided through a maze of corridors that lead you between  very cool interactives. Its a bit like Meow Wolf.. but more techy and less story. Here are some pics of the demos. Pics dont really do it justice though.. you really have to be there !

One of my favorites was the most simple.. three rooms filled with pure colored light.. It was so cool to see the world in monochrome. 

Next was an interactive space which transmuted motion to projected images

 

Then there was a room full of suspended spheres with addressable LEDS.. It reminded me of the piece my friends Mat and Eric made at Echo. several years ago. 

 

My favorite was a piece that allowed a person or small group to dance at one end of the room to music , then their images were sliced and diced and re-mixed into a n amazing video montage

One crazy conceptual piece was called “Secrets Hotline”.  people could call in their secrets.. then they were randomly played back under a bunch of mushrooms you could walk under and listen.   Soem of them were funny., some were dark.. some were really heartfelt

 

Another favorite was a huge ball pit which was washed from beneath  with color patterns from LEDS. pretty simple, but very effective.. The guide told us that people lost all sorts of stuff.. cell phones, earbuds., iwatches.. and earrings.. we jumped in looking for  Haileys eating.. we found one, but it wasn’t hers 🙂

then on to soem other LED stuff.. like this room of lit up tubes

 

Then a kaleiascope room.. two round displays with a nice interactive control panel for each

 

We loved hopscotch.. you should definetly check it out if you can. 
One the way home we stopped by Gabes lab to do a few steps on an experiment he’s running. Always so cool to see where he works.. and all that he knows how to do !

More from the coast tomorrow !

nite all, nite sam

-me

Had a productive day at work, then walked over to the Airport to meet DIane (An advantage of workign next to the airport !)

Tonight we’re heading out to Portland to see Gabe for Thanksgiving. I’ll be workign out there for the reast of the week and part of next week.

Traveling like this is a real benefit of semi retirement !

More from out there !
nite all, nite sam
-me 

Today  we were going to have a Board meeting of one of the three orgs I serve as a board member.. I realized that I take these roles on in the hopes of helping out. on casues I support.. . but quickly find I’m ill suited to board work. I find I don’t particularly like organizing things.. though I absolutely believe in the need of boards who are organized. I also really don’t like the financial parts  that boards have to do..eg budgets and fund raising / developement .   That often leaves me at best bored .. at worst  it makes me at odds with other board members who are really tryign to do the neccessary work to make these orginaztions effective.   In contrast, one of those Boards is actually about building printed circuit boards. . which is something I LOVE doing !!!!..

I think I need toe xtricate myselfe from the organizational parts and stick to making things..
What do you think  ?

 

 

Nite all, nite sam

-me

The big fun for today is that I got my 2nd revision of my Alia circuit board workign. Its part of the work I’m doing for  our Project OnBoard 

where we’re tryign to introduce 1000 hgh school kids aroudn the word to the fun of creatong Printed circuit boards. I did this as a demo of whats possible. THis board is in the shape of our Alia airplane.. it has 12 rgb leds per propeller and 8 for the tail . It doss all sorts of color patterns.. and has an inertial measurment uint that allow is to detect its pitch and roll. I have the lights reacting to that angle of the plane to demonstrate the force vectorign our plane does to keep its position in the air as it pitches and rolls. Its also a wireless device.. I hope to eventually make it into a controller for a flight simulator. .. hwo cool would that be ?!?!

 

I’ super happy  how this came out !nite all, nite sam

-me