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--- newsletters:2025-06 [2025/07/06 21:23] – [Demos and applications] osnr
+++ newsletters:2025-06 [2025/07/07 11:43] (current) – Add Andrés July up next admin
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 ====== June 2025 newsletter ======
-TODO:
-  - [x] Make the Luma for July open house
-  - [x] Make the Substack
-  - [ ] Schedule the Substack send
-  - [x] Cull and note Discord links to summarize
-  - [x] Fill in "What we've been up to"
-  - [x] Fill in "Demos and applications" (GitHub)
 If you want to stop by the studio, our next Folk open house is **[[https://lu.ma/adpapu2f|in the evening on Thursday, July 31]], in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.**
@@ Line 42: / Line 34: @@
 Omar: two big bursts of work on the gadget this month.
-One was while I was at Gradient Retreat in Canada.
+One burst was while I was at Gradient Retreat in Canada. I brought my gadget and quickly found that it was hard to calibrate and physically unstable (the projector kept swiveling around inside it).
-Another was in preparation for our Recurse Center talk this week.
+So I made a new front panel (blue) that has insets 6mm inward from it to push the projector backward so it can't turn, and a lip below the projector to keep it from nodding:
+{{newsletters:img_1757.jpeg?250px}}
+I made calibration fixes on folk2 and folk1 (discussed elsewhere in this newsletter), especially fixing the text bug:
+{{newsletters:img_1766.jpeg?250px}}
+A painful thing with the gadget is that its Ultimems AnyBeam laser beam scanning projector makes it hard to capture a whole projector image in a single camera frame (because you only get a subregion at a time if you're exposing the camera for less than like 15ms).
+So I've been cranking the exposure time way up (150ms+), which causes it to loop around in a weird way, and then calibrating it in the dark. Weirdly, this kind of works OK.
+I also found that the Wi-Fi dongle is sketchy (I tuned a bunch of power saver settings to try to help; it also just can't do ad-hoc Wi-Fi) and probably overloading the current capacity of the USB bus. So I did a new revision that uses the official Orange Pi 5 Wi-Fi board instead of a USB dongle.
+I also made a new revision of the gadget1 that uses a Raspberry Pi and HDMI projector, but now has a stereo USB camera like gadget2:
+{{newsletters:img_2083.jpeg?250px}}
+Another burst is in preparation for our Recurse Center talk (this coming week). We found a bug with camera slices where they flicker (trying to fix now). Accidentally fried battery system while moving into a new chassis (some short, burned the cable) so bought a new one and that seems to work (it might just have been the USB-C cable, honestly).
 ==== folk2 ====
@@ Line 52: / Line 62: @@
 (There are also still some significant blinking-out bugs when you have multiple programs out.)
-I made some nicety improvements to calibration (which I also backported to folk1).
+I made some more nicety improvements / bug fixes to calibration this month (some of which I also backported to folk1):
+  * Made the slider range for exposure time more reasonable by default, not up to 10,000ms or whatever (if you need weird exposure time like that, just type it in)
-I fixed the dashed-line outline for the gadget.
+  * [[https://github.com/FolkComputer/folk/commit/14190eb0c868c8cb1b7c37c554731186f0659510|Text scales based on tag size]] so it doesn't collide with it on gadget
-==== General system improvements ====
+    * This was the bug that was fixed (see how the label text is too big and collides with tags so you can't calibrate):
+      * {{newsletters:img_1701.jpeg?250px}}
+  * Made background color of calibrate settable from white (I ended up not using this) so you can deal with higher exposure times without washing out
+  * Autorefresh waits for prev frame to fully load (also backported to folk1)
+  * Camera now [[https://github.com/FolkComputer/folk/commit/856a523ffd4c5605bb16018cb3480a7a1cac9300|claims crop size]] so the calibration loads properly
-  * TODO
+I also [[https://github.com/FolkComputer/folk/commit/3b97da27b69faeb19892ea4a91f436cd2b16ddfe|fixed the dashed-line outline for the gadget to use the new projection stuff.]]
 ==== Outreach ====
@@ Line 66: / Line 80: @@
   * Group photo:
-    * {{newsletters:june-2025-open-house-group-selfie-medium.jpeg}}
+    * {{newsletters:june-2025-open-house-group-selfie-medium.jpeg?300px}}
     * Featuring: [[https://pontus.granstrom.me/|Pontus Granström]], a friend of Pontus,[[https://x.com/varjoshi|Varun Joshi]], Andrés Cuervo, [[https://www.meghna-rao.com/|Meghna Rao]], Omar Rizwan
-  * A picture of Verun Joshi's's photo of our GitHub repo so later reference:
+  * A picture of Varun's photo of our GitHub repo so later reference:
-    * {{newsletters:june-2025-open-house-img_2799-photo-of-photo-of-folk-gh-repo-medium.jpeg}}
+    * {{newsletters:june-2025-open-house-img_2799-photo-of-photo-of-folk-gh-repo-medium.jpeg?200px}}
   * [[https://www.meghna-rao.com/|Meghna Rao]] turning 1. a photo of an ice cream into a little stop motion art using our animation binder program and 2. using her phone's flashlight to create a spontaneous animation:
     - {{newsletters:june-2025-open-house-img_2803.gif}}
@@ Line 81: / Line 95: @@
     * They had the great idea of making a stop motion animation using multiple Folk stickers
       * {{newsletters:img_8247.gif}}
-  * Andrés had their (receipt printer themed) birthday party at Hex House and gave [[https://samismith.com/|Sami Smith]] and [[https://eka.hn/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaf97wA4cf-wJDz0nRWl5oNZ6YKVYRfqoxkDQpa6kM0XVXtyS3cL3x-2g8RMog_aem_NjyXQ32hD0h5Tf2HGYXT7Q|Evan Kahn]] a tour of some shiny new Folk programs in the studio:
+  * Andrés had their (receipt printer themed) birthday party at Hex House and gave [[https://samismith.com/|Sami Smith]] and [[https://eka.hn/|Evan Kahn]] a tour of some shiny new Folk programs in the studio:
     * {{newsletters:img_9322-medium.jpeg?400px}}
     * {{newsletters:img_9326.gif}}
+  * [[https://www.justinliang.me|Justin Liang]] set up a system at ITP Camp in downtown Brooklyn and ran a workshop teaching people how to use it, which got a lot of excitement -- a couple hundred programs were printed out over the lifetime of that system, I think (our friend [[https://violand.xyz/|Viola He]] made some triangle programs)
+    * {{newsletters:img_2163.jpeg?0x300px}} {{newsletters:img_2164.jpeg?0x300px}}
-===== What we'll be up to in June =====
+===== What we'll be up to in July =====
   * **Our next Folk open house is [[https://lu.ma/adpapu2f|in the evening on Thursday, July 31]], in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.**
-  * Omar: TBD
+  * Omar: continue trying to make calibration work well in folk2
-  * Andrés: TBD
+  * Omar: try to fix blinking bugs in folk2
+  * Andrés: Video, video, video
+  * Andrés: Planning **[[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdxSlV9YxGZO2pa0qwB5GeeOkt_1RB32drwMbXjnHUeS_-TJA/viewform?usp=dialog |workshops]]**
+  * Andrés: Kosmik integration
+  * Omar and Andrés giving [[https://lu.ma/sxqm12i0|a talk about the Folk gadget at Recurse Center]] on July 7 (currently sold out, though)
 ===== Links we've enjoyed =====
@@ Line 105: / Line 125: @@
 ==== Andrés ====
-  *
+  * Blair Neal's new art experiment [[https://ablairneal.com/project/forgetting-light|Forgetting Light - (Photochromic canvas + laser projector)
+]]
+  * [[https://github.com/seeddisperser/kelmscott-mono|Kelmscott Mono]] - A blackletter typeface for your text editor (I've been using it as mine this month, it's a wild but fun experience.)
+  * [[https://willowprotocol.org|Willow]] — "Protocols for synchronisable data stores."
+  * [[https://github.com/Samsung/Tizen.NET]] — the obscure .NET framework for making Samsung TV apps
+  * [[https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLpcOEhRnxd/?igsh=bW5uOGJwZnBybTd6|Making holographic butter]] using diffraction grating
+  * [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuxBfKA3U5M&t=53s|A beginner's guide to ESP32]]
+  * The [[https://lilygo.cc/products/t-encoder-pro-us|LILYGO T-Encoder Pro]] — An ESP32 powered rotary encoder with a fascinating little circular display
+  * [[https://toitlang.org|Toit]] is a modern high-level language designed specifically for microcontrollers