Greetings from #rdcHQ! We are pleased to announce that initial work on the 351-Archive has begun! We’re jazzed about this new endeavor as development on 351-Archive will also fuel our software for displaying art and photography online at Point.B Studio. This code will replace the deprecated eSPG v2.0 code that we used for many years for The Memory Palace Project and more.

351-Archive will be an ongoing project this summer, with a full launch of all of our websites that are part of this system-wide upgrade in the Fall. We’ll post about our progress periodically and share a few photos from the collection along the way! So, if you have been wondering where some of your favorite Point.B websites are, don’t worry … they’ll be back, better than ever … Stay tuned!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! Much of our summer program this year will include beta-testing and development for one of our favorite open source projects, The Thing System. We have set up a corner of our web site and our media lab specifically for this purpose and we will report our findings here. Today we are publishing research for two bulbs, The Philips Hue and the LiFX which are currently in use at #rdcHQ. Similar experiments will be conducted on all of the LED bulbs currently installed at our home base … Stay tuned for more news from #rdcHQ!

2014 #rdcHQ Lightmapping Lab Lineup

Please Note: This list is subject to expand as new things are added to the #rdcHQ Media Lab. This summer, we are primarily focused on lighting however you just never know what we will explore next … Click on an icon to learn more about any thing ↓

It’s been a tough couple of weeks at #rdcHQ. Our beloved pugs, Tripod and Phineas, are missing. They were lost on April 25th while in the care of a pugsitter, and it has been an excruciating time as we have done everything we know to bring them home. We have hoped and prayed for their safe return. We don’t understand why tragic things like this happen, but we do know that when they do, we can’t stay in a sad place for very long. As we continue with our work, we’ll also continue to search for them and keep our fingers crossed, so very hopeful to be reunited again.

This is the flyer we are distributing to find Phineas and Tripod. To date, there has been no trace of them so we believe they have been picked up by someone who is caring for them. A substantial reward is offered for their safe return home.

Download as a PDF Flyer – Please help us find Phineas and Tripod.

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We’re learning a lot configuring our bulbs to work with #thethingsystem. We recently came across an unexpected issue when we purchased a second Philips Hue Starter Pack to round out the collection of bulbs in our street level gallery. We discovered that when you buy a starter pack the bulbs are pre-paired with the enclosed bridge so you cannot easily swap between systems. After a bit of research we discovered an app known as “LampStealer”, with a clever looking icon that looks familiar (at right).

LampStealer

LampStealer is listed on the everyhue site (which is not an official Philips Hue site but is frequented by developers from Philips) as an approved solution to deal with the problem that we are experiencing, so we decided to give it a go instead of returning our Starter Pack for three unpaired standalone bulbs. The second bridge is useful to replace our current one if necessary, or if we would like to begin a second Hue system at another location. The ability to unpair and re-pair bulbs is a fundamental need and should be included in any app dealing with internet controllable bulbs, so we give LampStealer two #rdcHQ thumbs up (despite the unfortunate name – perhaps LampSwapper or LampPairer would be more appropriate).

When you launch the LampStealer application, you will be prompted to locate your Philips Hue Bridge so that you can unpair the bulb from the previous bridge and, in turn, pair it with the new bridge. You will first need to click on the “Find Bridge” button and then select the IP number of your bridge when it appears. Once the bridge is selected, click on the “Start Linking” button to begin the process. The bulb will flash three times and then glow to show that it has been successfully reset.

The next part is very important – your bulb must be 30cm away from the Philips Hue bridge in order for LampStealer to work. This is known as “touch linking” and can also be achieved using telnet (for anyone who might have a bias against Java). This was our backup solution if we were unable to get LampStealer to work for us.

Once we successfully completed the pair/unpair sequence for all of our new bulbs, we were able to access them in our steward and control the color and brightness. Yay!

Stay Tuned … and Stay Bright!