In September this year, I released a new version of the open source 16-fader MIDI controller I maintain - 16nx. This was a complete redesign of the hardware of the device, and as a result, also a completely new firmware. Redesigning the device was in one sense, a necessity. 16n - the original faderbank - was designed around the Teensy 3.2, a microcontroller development board that had effectively become end-of-life, and was no longer available. Given that, it was impossible to make the device....| Tom Armitage
I was working up to the wire in 2024; my main client project wrapped up on December 20th. It was an intense sprint finish to the year, and since then, after some genuine rest, I’ve mainly been getting my feet back under the desk, and slowly trying to bring the shape of 2025 into focus. What was I up to in the past six-ish months? Google Deepmind - further prototyping / exploration I returned to the AIUX team at Deepmind for another stint on the project we’d been working on (see: Summer 20...| Tom Armitage
Coming up for air. What happened is: I lined up the Next Thing (as mentioned at the end of last quarter’s worknotes), and then it promptly proceeded to entirely consume my time and brain for the next quarter. Which is good, from an income-and-labour perspective, but was somewhat to the detriment of the content strategy here, where I’d hoped to be able to write smaller, spikier pieces of content between the studio updates. So a goal for this quarter: making sure I don’t let client work o...| Tom Armitage
A quarter has passed since the last worknotes; now’s a good time to reflect on what I’ve been up to. Lunar Energy Two pieces of work this quarter with the Design team at Lunar. I wrapped up the project mentioned at the end of 2023 in January, as I’d expected. A second project emerged in March, exploring generative/systemic graphic and motion design, and that wrapped that up this week. There should be things I can point at and say more about very soon. Creative Computing Institute It’s...| Tom Armitage
This is a recent prototype. It’s a custom PCB that takes a single Cherry MX style keyswitch, with a resistor and an LED positioned to illuminate the keycap, broken out to pins. That’s it. It’s part of a larger prototype, that involves buttons and controls and many chips. For a while now I’ve taken to prototyping quite large electronics projects in their full, final form. That means getting a large board made, fully populated with all parts, and then debugging it. It should work first ...| Tom Armitage
I was really taken with this, which @scy (Tim Weber) posted on Mastodon the other day: The Mastodon post is very clear, so to quickly summarize: The device has crashed; it’s shared its stack trace optically, using the LED button matrix on the device. To share that stacktrace with the development team, the end-user only has to post a photograph of it to the development Discord, where an image-analysing bot decodes it and shares the stacktrace line references as hexadecimal. Neat, end-to-end ...| Tom Armitage
I recently shipped some client work - a small prototyping project - written in Python. Which is surprising, given I would say - if asked - that “I don’t write Python“. A lot of people write a lot of Python these days. It’s a common teaching language; it’s a lingua franca for machine learning and data science; it’s used as a scripting language for products I use such as Kicad or Blender. But it’s passed me by. I first wrote Ruby in 2004, which I still love, and that’s served my...| Tom Armitage
2023 was frustratingly fallow, despite all best efforts. Needless to say, not just for me - the technology market has seen lay-offs and funding cutbacks and everything has been squeezed. But after a quiet few months, the end of 2023 got very busy, and there’s been a few different projects going on that I wanted to acknowledge. It looks like these will largely be drawing to a close in early 2024, so I’ll be putting feelers out around February. I reckon. In the meantime, several things goin...| Tom Armitage
I’ve begun a small piece of ongoing consultancy with Promising Trouble on their Community Connectivity project. It’s a good example of the strategy and consulting work I do in my practice, alongside more hands-on technology making. Promising Trouble is working with Impact on Urban Health on a multi-year partnership to explore how access to the internet impacts health and wellbeing. I’ve been working in an advisory capacity on a pilot project that will test the impact of free - or extrem...| Tom Armitage
I’ve shared a new case study of the work I did this summer with Lunar Energy (see previous worknotes). As I explain at length over at the post, it’s a great example of the kind of work I relish, that that necessarily straddles design and engineering. It’s a project that goes up and down the stack, modern web front-ends talking to custom hardware, and all in the service of interaction design. Lunar were a lovely team to work with; thanks to Matt Jones and his crew for being great to work...| Tom Armitage
In the past couple of years I mentioned working on an early-stage startup project I codenamed Wrekin (see relevant blogposts) - in part because it hadn’t launched out of stealth. Since then lots has moved on, not least the launch of the product as Castrooms. Castrooms brings the energy of a crowd to music livestreaming. It’s a streaming platform designed first and foremost for music - for both performers and fans. Audience members watch streams with their camera on: performers have a crow...| Tom Armitage
What’s been going on in the studio this summer? UAL Creative Computing Institute I finished another term of teaching at CCI: as usual, teaching the first year BSc Creative Computing students about Sound and Image Processing - an introduction to implementing audio and graphics in code. That means pixel arrays, dithering, audio buffers, unit generators, building up to particle systems and flocking - all with a focus on the creative application of these topics. It was great to see where the st...| Tom Armitage
I’ve spent much of 2022 working with SvelteKit as one of my primary development environments. Kit hit its 1.0 release in December 2022. I’ve spent some time evangelising it to developer colleagues, many of whom may not have encountered it, and a year with Kit feels like a good time to summarise that time, and explain why I’m spending so much time with it. First, we should start with Svelte. Svelte Svelte is a reactive component framework for building web front-ends. Think of it like Rea...| Tom Armitage
What happened was: I meant to write about the end of 2021 before a big project in 2022 kicked off. And instead, 2022 came around, the project kicked off hard and whoosh it’s now the Spring. I have been quiet here, but busy at work. And so, here we are. What’s been going on? Wrekin wrapped up in the autumn, as expected. I completed my final pieces of documentation, and handed them over. Recently, I’ve been doing a small amount of handover and advisory work with their new lead developer a...| Tom Armitage
It’s autumn. What’s been going on since I last wrote? Teaching at UAL-CCI I wrapped up a term of teaching a single module at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute. Sound and Image Processing is a module about using code to generate and manipulate images, video, and sound. The explanation I use in the first week is: we’re not learning how to operate Photoshop, we’re learning how to write Photoshop. The course worked its way up the ladder of abstraction, starting with the representation ...| Tom Armitage
Last week I sent all the files necessary to build the first draft at my Ilkley prototype to China. That means the plotting files to make the circuit boards, the list of all the components on them, the positions of all the components. The factory’s going to make the circuit boards and attach most of the components for me. This is good, because many of the components are tiny. The Ilkley prototype is on two boards: a ‘brain’ board that contains the microcontroller and almost all the elect...| Tom Armitage
It’s the middle of February, 2021. What’s going on since I last wrote, and what’s coming up next? Wrapping up at CaptionHub My stint at CaptionHub got extended a little, and I finally wrapped in the middle of February, last week. Everything went as well as I could have hoped on the overhaul of some fundamental parts of the codebase that I was working on. I’m pleased with the decisions we made. It was good to review all the work with the team and agree that, yes, those decisions we too...| Tom Armitage
I taught at Hyper Island this year for my fourth year now, as Industry Leader for the Digital Technologies module of their part-time Digital Management MA. At the end of the course, I give a paper where I talk about personal process and practice. It’s a bit left-of-centre: not so much Best Practice, as Things I Have Found Useful. I always tweak and rework the course a little each year. This year, I came to this paper, and found myself stuck. In it, I talked about the value of personal docum...| Tom Armitage
I wrapped up phase two of Easington. We completed the beta of our interactive game-like thing that we built to explain the output of that phase. The prototype evolved a lot during the phase. Probably the best thing that happened as it progressed was that things I’d initially described in text were extracted to state. That is to say, we made it more gamelike: rather than describing other possible outcomes of an action, why not find a way of letting the user alter the state of the world, and ...| Tom Armitage
Another couple of weeks with my head down on Easington. It’s a challenging project to talk about, because of NDAs. But that’s somewhat the point of weeknotes: noting not only what I did, but how, and why. The job isn’t to share the details of what I was up to: it’s to share the parts I felt worth sharing as insights into process, or thought, or for me to remember in the future. The project has moved to a new section of exploration, which is involving less prototyping of working code, ...| Tom Armitage
Music as a design material: describing energy data with sound| tomarmitage.com