Digital Naturalism Laboratories
Institute for Interactive Jungle Crafts
I’m a graduate candidate at Marquette University in Wisconsin USA. I study community ecology in tropical forests primarily using trees and lianas. I’m also an embedded systems engineer and have designed various scientific sensors. At Dinalab I am working on some embedded computer vision and machine learning projects to study animal behavior.
Here’s code and designs for making a simple tire into a touch sensitive input that can really be smashed around!
also available in the ART&&CODE zine
The Zine
Sample Cap Touch Code here. Library is embedded in the code, so just upload and go!
https://github.com/quitmeyer/WorkshopFieldCode/tree/master/Plant%20Touch
Just connect something metal between Analog Port A0 on your Arduino to the metal insides of the tire (preferably a chain or something that gives you some distance!)
Make Garbage Masks into Useful things! Like ear savers to wear more masks!
For those who just want to get to the meat of this How-to, here’s the basic recipe:
-Slice up a mask and keep the two outside layers (throw away the middle) Heat the layers between parchment paper at 200C/400f
Full Instructable Herehttps://www.instructables.com/Ear-Savers-From-Garbage-Masks/?cb=1604517248Disposable blue masks have become iconic on faces and unfortunately, littered about the streets. The ubiquity of disposable masks is helping fight the pandemic, but all these single-use plastics have an environmental toll as well. This is a simple project demonstrating how to turn waste PPE into other covid-fighting safety materials. Also I just liked the kind of meta-idea of turning old masks into new mask accessories!
With the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Q Digital platform, we were commissioned to make an educational game about the life cycle of leaf-cutter ants. Explore how the colony works by chopping leaves to feed the fungus, defending the ants from parasites, and finding new mates to spread your leaf-cutter empire!
You can see it all on STRI’s Qdigital https://stri.si.edu/education-outreach/qdigital/leaf-cutter-empire
Produced by Digital Naturalism Laboratories for The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Q Bus.
Development by Brian Boucher, Bilal Cheema, Steven Solof, and Andrew Quitmeyer
Art design by Kitty Quitmeyer
Scientific advising by Dr. Hannah Marti
Music and Sound Effects by Dan Singer https://ridgedchippies.bandcamp.com/releases
This year the incredible PIFcamp was ant-themed! So in conjunction with our research about modular insect sensors, we got to lead a workshop on Wearable Ant farms.
Read a great breakdown of the entire workshop with pics and videos in Cherise Fong’s nice article about it in Makery:
Here’s some of the awesome videos put together by the PIFcamp excellent documentation crew including our introductory lecture!
We created a CoViD-19 simulation game for Q?-Bus at STRI. The goal is to let people get a better understanding of how diseases spread, and the effectiveness and consequences of different approaches.
Created by Brian Boucher and Andy Quitmeyer for STRI Q-Bus
Version in English
Amy is an awesome scientific illustrator who has been spending her time in Dinalab making incredible works of art for scientists producing new papers! Check out her insta @dormantseeds and her website https://www.amykoehlerart.com/ to see the incredible stuff she makes!
Cindy works as a researcher for Rachel Page’s bat lab and Wouter Halfwerk’s frog research lab here in Gamboa. She is an incredible, reliable, hard-worker with loads of experience with animals and behavioral experimentation. She is also an amazing cook and has been supplying dinalab with an endless supply of terrific food during quarantine.
She also was responsible for keeping 1000 experimental frogs alive during the pandemic shutdown! She rocks and we will miss her!
In panama, when the government started the world’s only gender-based (and highly transphobic ) Covid Lockdown, we helped out a local activism group make signs out of discarded cardboard to fight against this cruel system.
More info, and how to make them!
https://www.instructables.com/Giant-Articulated-Protest-Hands-Laser-Cut/
Game for teaching kids about how spectrograms work. In english and spanish!
Open FullScreenSpanish Version
Old Version in www.openprocessing.org