A place to learn about coding, making things, and stuff that strikes my fancy.
Now that we've designed our interface by designing our visual language and defining the nouns and verbs, we've laid out the screens using that visual interface, and built some of the basic building blocks: the code to draw our interface elements and the code to manage our screen, all that is left to do is... Continue Reading →
In the last article I covered the "Model-View-Controller" code; the way we can think about building interfaces by separating our code into the "model"--the code that does stuff--from the "view"--the code that draws stuff--and the "controller"--the code that controls the behavior of your code. And we sketched the model code: the low level code which... Continue Reading →
Thus far we've talked about designing a user interface: the visual language that tells users what they can do, the elements of the language (nouns and verbs), the way these things contribute to consistency and discoverability and how they can be used to create a user interface that seems... inevitable. Simple. Invisible. Where this attention... Continue Reading →
We have a design language of sorts. We have some simple code. We have an idea of the functions we wish to implement for our Arduino-based thermostat. Now let's use that design language and lay out the rest of our screens. Full disclosure. For any complex UI, and let's be honest: this is a bit... Continue Reading →
Last time we discussed the theory of user interface design. The idea that user interfaces form a sort of language, complete with nouns and verbs and modifiers. That user interfaces need to be discoverable and consistent, and that parts of discoverability means defining affordances: things the user can see and think "oh, that must be... Continue Reading →
I have always wanted to write a series of articles on user interface design from the ground up, but I've never seem to have the time. Well, it's time to take the time, and now that I have this beautiful little 2.8" TFT Touch Shield that thus far I've been using to show how to... Continue Reading →
My ultimate goal is to recreate the 3D printed object in brass, creating a small little tabletop Orrery for display. That means, of course, cutting gears. So there has been a little bit of a pause while I order the correct things for gear cutting. Ultimately my goal is to set up a Sherline mill... Continue Reading →
One of the advantages of our design is that we can rapidly port our 3D drawing code to another platform. In fact, we could port our code off the Arduino entirely and move it to a different microprocessor or even to your desktop computer. All we have to do is to alter how we initialize... Continue Reading →
We have all the pieces. Let's put them together, shall we? With the last article we had a clipping algorithm which could clip lines so that only the visible lines are displayed. Now let's put the whole thing together. Some Math in Code. On our second article we introduced the concept of Homogeneous Coordinates. This... Continue Reading →
