Michael “Wally” Wallace, a Baltimore middle school science teacher, is a practitioner of a peculiar art form. His works, which he spends hours planning and executing, are created with a beat-up mountain bike, an Android smartphone, and the streets and open spaces of his home city as canvas. But the only way his creations can be seen is when he shares them on his Instagram and Twitter feeds, or on the Strava fitness tracking application.
For the past eight years, Wallace—who goes by “WallyGPX” on his chosen platforms—has been a “GPS artist,” drawing his creations Etch-A-Sketch-style with tracks of global positioning data left by his bike routes. Wallace is one of a collection of early adopters of fitness tracking apps who discovered that they could turn their runs, bike routes, and other tracking data into a form of geeky, sometimes subversive self-expression.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.