New Perspective

at this point I were able to notice a different perspective within the relation between me and digital environment, it is the digitizing process. although digitizing is a fundamental feature of digital environment and it is technically there all the time, but, me as a technology user was dealing with it as a natural communication process that have it is own forms of bonds its providing between the user and technology and these forms are unquestionable technological musts.

conceiving digital technology in this form provided me with the space to think about a possible use to this process, and to think again about the source, form and type of data to digitize alongside my usual digitized actions. 

developing plan

thorough the process of creating this interface, many questions came to my mind. such as, why developers tend to recreate digital form of existed techniques. without any doubt, there is loads of advantages doing this, but, my question is why not to think of other forms of communication that invest the massive technical abilities of today digital technology.

Finalizing the project

This project gave me a very clear insight of how to develop and design a semi traditional art technique with a digital flavor. this type of digital interfacing can be considered the most natural way to communicate with digital art environment, as it is mimicking what most artist used to do using non digital painting tools. 

First Try :)

Using the project to produce the first drawing, it was very effective way to interact with digital environment. it can be compared to traditional drawing, but of course with all benefits of digital environment and possibly some minor drawbacks, such as it lacks feel of fraction with and on different materials.

First result

This image shows the project first result. after a few position calibrations. every thing is working fine including pen pressure sensitivity.

Drawing Interface structure

The project is working fine now. I got, a working LCD panel that recognize stylus position and tip pressure. this electromagnetic field is providing pen location, it sense pen hoovering from about one inch distance, and supply it is X and Y coordinates to the system. following a list and structure shows the main and final components employed in this project:

- Rigid supporting panel isolated with aluminium foil coat to cut off signal interference.

- stylus detector board that sense pen location and it is equipped with a controller board that translate location into usable data, and also collect other pen actions such as tip pressure and the other keys and send it to the computer.

- LCD SXGA panel controller. this controller was also causing an electromagnetic interference at the top part of the panel as it was fixed behind the screen upper part. the solution was to detach it from LCD back and isolate it with aluminium isolating tape, it is working very good now.

- LCD back light as described in the previous post, was replaced with a white LED strip.

- LCD driver that connect the panel to the PC.

- Acrylic working surface for easy hand resting and pen movement and to protect the LCD panel fragile surface.

LCD back-light inverter

this probably was the most tricky part so far. So when I tried the digitizer in the very begin of this project it was working fine even when I put the LCD panel between the digitizer and the digital pen (LCD was off). the tricky part was when I tried it again with powered panel, strange thing happened, the curser was shifting wiggling on the screen. the only idea came to my mind was that there is a magnetic field was affecting the wireless signal when the screen is on. I stripped the LCD as much as I can, but again still too much interference there. the only thing that I was able to remove more was the LCD back light, it was a CCFL based lamp not an LED one. this solved the problem, so I replaced it with LED light strip and it did the job. 

Multi port LCD driver

This LCD Driver was very helpful in this experiment. it is flexible and accept a wide range of LCD panels, also it support multi port type as input connections. generic and very easy to setup. figure out the pin connection between the LCD and the Driver was bit tricky. and the 1.2 mm pitch connection was too tiny to solder wires to it. flashed the driver with the most compatible software to my panel properties, and it is all ready now. 

Phase One

the initial part of my experiments is to discover the technical side of different forms of interaction with digital environment.I will start with the most common artmaking interaction form, the stylus display. the reason to start analysing this interaction form is to identify the technical processes that can reveal the actual artist-artwork relation during the artmaking process using this form of interface. the analysis process can help develop new forms of conversation with different technical base that employed the power of digital environment.

parts used in this project:

- electromagnetic sensor that will works as a pen position digitiser. 

- LCD panel that fit or close to the digitiser size (in my experiment it is 14.1" screen with 16:9 ratio). 

- LCD driver, in order to run and connect the panel I got a generic LCD Driver that I managed to wire it to the panel. the LED driver is accessible through HDMI port that transfer PC data to the panel.

- wires and PCB to make the connections.

Starting Point

As a part of my PhD research, I am starting an art project discovers the artist-artwork relation within digital environment.