• Cristóbal Sciutto has been working on a demo that uses Folk to display book covers from a digital library – under the hood, it's doing some fun new things with calibre-server:
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  • Omar: Two observations about Cristóbal's library system:
    • it's always cool when we can get concrete data into Folk that has inherent user interest, rather than self-contained demos
    • this is a good example of the little nicety of http:// image url support paying off and composing, would be much more annoying to do this without that (hopefully we can parallelize the http get and calibredb calls in increasingly clean ways as we improve the interpreter)

• Vedran Budimcic has been building a Scratch-like environment in Folk. This month, he added support for multiple characters:
  • Vedran: I think I only need to do a few more things before I can let me kids try to break it: 1. Put the cards on something thicker like cardboard. Easier for little hands. Maybe laminate as well. 2. Consider character actions from left to right instead of order of appearance. Right now it only considers the actions on the right of the “play” pages, but doesn't consider their order.

• Andrés:
  • We have a booklet that shows you how to animate letters in Folk via position, rotation, and kerning. For a few months this has had an annoying deprecation warning from updating our graphics API, so I took a morning a few days ago to refactor the programs to the new graphics API (e.g. Wish $this draws a circle with color red) and add scaling animations to the final page. Here's the final result:
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  • I've been looking at The Book of Shaders again recently and was inspired to try taking a few of the introductory examples and porting them into Folk. Below you can see I took the first three shaders (a solid red shader, a flashing red to white demo, and a resolution coloring example), implemented them in Folk's Vulkan shader pipeline, and then glued those onto printouts of the chapters I took the demos from.
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    • I translated a ~300-line shader titled "Raymarched Hexagonal Truchet" from Shadertoy into Folk, it was a much simpler process than expected:
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  • I adjusted the resolution coloring example to take up the entire screen — impractical when sharing the table with others but could be fun for presentations.
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• Andrés presented their project at the final show for the NYU ITP Fellowship program for the '23-'24 academic year.
  • It was a collection of games (a word search program, pac man, pong, and a mini drawing demo) that could be run inside of Folk. People had fun making their own image markers as game controller pieces:
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  • Setup at the Clive Davis Gallery:
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    • Andrés and Omar disassembled the cart system from ITP (in Downtown Brooklyn) and brought it all back to the studio in East Williamsburg:
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• Omar added Commit (on PAGE) so Andrés could make 'copy program source code into tabletop editor' work properly – fixes a long-standing omission where you couldn't change Commits from outside the committing program
• Omar added a GPU function wish – another thing we should have done a while ago
  • Replaces needing to manually run Gpu::fn on the GPU process
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  • Slightly updated the GPU guide to reflect this
• s-ol bekic added support for paginating long programs so they print on multiple pages! (as well as A4 support) we've wanted this for a while
• Omar did a cleanup of the repo, removing the pi/ and play/ folder (preparing for opening the repo more to the public)
  • Inlined hardware interface code into the virtual-programs – should make it much easier to read since all GPU stuff is in one file, all AprilTag stuff is in one file, all camera stuff is in one file, etc
  • Removed a lot of globals, publishing code/lambda through statements instead
• Andrés added support for CSS-style color formats in drawing:
  • 0xNNN or 0xNNNNNN
  • rgb(N,N,N)
  • hsl(N,N%,N%)
• Naveen Michaud-Agrawal added a ''crop'' option to image rendering:
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• Andrés added a rotation slider on the web editor, so you can easily test what happens when a page is rotated before you print it
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• Omar has been working a bit on the portable gadget from last month
  • Got a good hand grip, working on and off on CAD for enclosure (need to fit Pi, Pi camera, threaded inserts for hand grip and projector)

folk-cnc is now working and released in a basic form. You can follow the link for installation and usage instructions. This feels like the absolute minimum useful thing, and we're looking forward to taking it further.

Omar finished porting Owen's gcode parser and tool calibration and preview logic. CNC tool calibration, where you move the machine to the 4 points and type their CNC coordinates in:

and tested it with a basic job – notice the projected preview in green vs. the actual cut in the wood:

Not perfect accuracy, but already useful & exciting.

Potential next steps:

• Once 3D calibration is in, and assuming the machine is stable, you might be able to get by just specifying the material plane for each session (drag a tag) and reuse most of the existing 3D-space calibration (might also make calibration more accurate on average if you have that model already)

• Make Folk drive the CNC machine (gcode sender) – should help automate/recheck CNC calibration also if it can move the machine for you

• Socializing the system so it can get used by other people in our studio space
  • Connects to making Folk drive the machine: ideally people can use the machine through Folk, not need to plug it into their laptop

• Move more of the UI into Folk / tabletop and away from the web UI (although the web UI is honestly not bad, it would be cool to have more design tools in physical space)

Prompted by the portable gadget and the CNC demo, Omar has been picking 3D calibration back up. We're hoping to get it merged next month in a backward-compatible way, so we don't have to port everything from 2D to 3D immediately.

It was in decent shape in December, so work on 3D calibration this month has involved a lot of small/polish tasks:

• brought it back up to date with main
• adding 2D compatibility in (it should be able to also do 2D calibration at the same time, if you capture some flat poses)
• support for choosing display and choosing camera (so we can reinitialize the camera at higher resolution when we calibrate – 720p usually isn't enough – and so I can test on a laptop plugged into external webcam and projector)
• worked on calibration UI
  • you can now see the number of poses projected on the calibration board (so you know how far into the calibration you are + whether you should be capturing a flat table pose or an in-the-air pose)
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  • little nice UI thing of pointing out the inner tag length that the user should measure in green
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• maybe trying to improve accuracy a little bit
• performance stuff (actually very related to improving accuracy, it might be the main problem – the more latency you have, the more time the board position can drift in your hand, reducing calibration accuracy)

• May open house:
  • It was small but fun, a lot of playing around with Folk programs. Andrés put a program on their hat, allowing them to look at things on the table and label them “Hello”.
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• s-ol set up a new Folk system in Milan, bringing the total to 22 systems:
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• Forrest O. has been organizing their Folk table – it's looking really nice:
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• Our next Folk open house is in the afternoon of Wednesday, June 26 at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

• Cilk Pousse
• The Handheld Is Dead! Long Live The Handheld! (via Leslie)
• "The angel librarian puts their reviews linked to QR codes and inside each book so they can hear their friends thoughts before checking them out"
• Opponent

• Attention Receipts: Utilizing Materiality of Receipts to Improve Screen-time Reflection [CHI2024] — cool to see a custom receipt printer used as a persistent utility.