I am running a summerschool on “Physical Computing with the Arduino” at Middlesex University
Dates: One week, from Mon 28 June to Friday 2 July 2010
Times: 10am to 5pm Monday to Friday
Where: Trent Park Campus, Middlesex University. Near Oakwood Tube station in London, UK.
Cost: £245. If you book before 19 May 2010 you get an early-payment discount of £30
From the brochure: “The Arduino is an electronics prototyping platform based on cheap, flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors and other actuators. Whether you are an artist, designer or hobbyist, this course will assume no previous experience with the system and rapidly take you to a level where you can develop your won interactive products or environments.”
Five full days gives us the opportunity to go into great depth and really develop your ideas. The course will run in the university’s Product Design and Engineering Department, which has excellent facilities.
It would help if you had a laptop, but it is not a requirement.
At the moment, the course is not on the Summerschool’s website, but it should go up very soon.
You can get a booking form and apply now.
Please email me if you want more details about the content of the course. For details about applying, payment, please contact the Summerschool Office.
About Me
Alex Zivanovic
I am a Senior Lecturer in Design Engineering at Middlesex University (Since July 2009).
I am developing my own interests in the human perception of physical movement, and in particular, robots as interactive sculpture. I have carried out a lot of research into the work of Edward Ihnatowicz, in particular, his work called the Senster.
To see my work, look at my Pages and keep an eye on my Blog for updates.
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More about me:
My full name is Aleksandar Zivanovic, but most people call me Alex.
I’m a Londoner and have lived all my life in the great city (bar a few years at university). My name originates from Serbia, which my parents left over 50 years ago. My father, Predrag, is a retired design engineer and my mother, Mirjana, is a retired mathematics schoolteacher. She still works as a tutor, giving lessons to GCSE standard in the West London area. If you would like to contact either of them, please email me. I have a brother, Stevan, who lives in Cambridge and works in IT.
I went to school at St. Saviour Infant School, then Christ Church C. of E. Juniour School, both in Ealing, and then to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith. When I finished school, I worked for a year at Texaco, before going to the University of Kent at Canterbury (now called the University of Kent). I gained an Upper Second Class (Hons.) Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Systems Engineering (Informatics) and a Masters degree by research in Electronic Engineering. My master’s thesis was on the development of a six-legged walking robot using a transputer to implement a parallel processing version of the ‘Subsumption Architecture’.
After that, I worked for a year and a bit at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington before joining the Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory, part of the Mechanical Engineering Department of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (now called Imperial College London) in October 1996 and I was awarded my PhD in December 2000. My project was on the development of a haptic robot to take blood samples from the forearm. The robot was called “The Bloodbot” and it caused a great deal of media interest (there were articles published about it in New Scientist, the BBC News website, and BBC World Service website, The Telegraph, and numerous other places). BBC’s “Tomorrow’s World” filmed it in action and broadcast a report on it on Wednesday 7th March 2001. After my PhD, I tried developing the Bloodbot as a commercial product but it didn’t pan out. In May 2002 I became a Research Associate in the same lab, working on a haptic virtual reality training system for knee arthroscopy for two years and then on MRI compatible robots for three years. I went part-time in February 2007 and finally left Imperial College at the end of June 2007.
See a video of me talking about one of my projects at the Dana Centre.
From July 2007 to July 2009 I was a freelance technology consultant and educator, specialising in working with artists and designers to help them realise their designs. I was particularly interested in Physical Computing (sensing and controlling the physical world with computers).
I ran workshops on using the Arduino microcontroller system.
I was a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art helping students on the Design Products course.
I was a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths, teaching Physical Computing in the Computing Department.
I was a visiting scholar at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University where I am continuing my research into robots as interactive sculpture.