When it comes to hacking, I tend to enjoy practical projects the most. The Arduino is like physical computing “duct tape” that gives one the ability to “duct tape” things that need constant attention or action. If you need a plant watered, or your fish tank pump monitored, or your bikini-clad friends to set off a musical instrument with just their bodies then the Arduino is just the tool you need. So what about fire?
Close-up of the UV TRON Sensor Tube
What’s going on here? What does this have to do with the giant lite brite for the Interactive Party? I’ll give you three guesses.
A few months back, I acquired the Monome that Bre had put together. It’s a neat little device and I was able to hook it up using SerialPyIO to get it to light up, play some games, and communicate over OSC, but I was having trouble making any good sounding music with it, and it was sitting on my shelf, unloved. It also needed an enclosure upgrade – I wanted to slim it down, make it a bit more sturdy, and let the circuits and the glow of the LEDs show through some sexy new clear acrylic.
AwesomeAugust spurred me into action, and I grabbed a template for a enclosure top, cleaned it up a bit, added screw holes, designed slices for the hollow body, and started cutting it on the NYCR Laser. I just managed to make it all fit on one sheet of 12″ x 24″ acrylic. I’ve put the template online and it’s and free for anyone to use/republish, however you like. Once it was sliced, I used acrylic cement to bond it all, snipped out the USB port, and it was good to go!
Making music for free…
While the laser was cutting away and the glue was drying on my new enclosure, I spent some time figuring out what tools to use to make music on the cheap. There’s lots of incredible, expensive software out there, but I’m really just playing around for now, and don’t have $500 to blow on a toy. While the full creative suites are often expensive, several companies make “runtime” versions that you can only use for playing instruments and patches other people have made. I decided on the free MaxMSP runtime, and fired up Edward Loveall‘s “ArpShift” script I found on the Monome forum to start programming sequences and changing their pitch and timing on the fly. It’s a great little script, but I wanted something a little more satisfying to listen to than the standard midi piano and other midi instruments it was playing, so I grabbed Native Instruments free Kontakt player samper and their free instrument sets. There are a lot more great scripts for MaxMSP and .nki instruments for Kontakt available on the web, so even without breaking the bank to roll your own instruments, you can make great sounding music on the fly. You can hear the simple tune I managed in just a few minutes with ArpShift and Kontakt in the video above.
I’m still looking for a good program to record the loops I’m creating with these instruments and assemble them into a song and I may break down and get myself a copy of Ableton Live LE for that. (Anyone know of other options for live loop creation and on the fly multitracking?)
In the meantime, I’ll be playing with my new music creation toy, and Ranjit and I will be teaming up to hook the Monome up to his Player Toy Piano for the NYCR Interactive Party this Saturday. If you want to play with the Monome/Player Toy Piano (or any of a bunch of other neat interactive projects in the works) RSVP, and we’ll see you there!
As part of our on-going Awesome-August effort, I just completed my FPGA-based DNA sequence alignment accelerator! Behold!
This bad boy can reach 1.8 Giga-cell-updates-per-second when aligning two DNA sequences, all while running off of less than 2.5W from a USB port. Step 1 in my evil plan to take over the world is complete!
While on vacation on Cape Cod, I got a chance to see Fritz of Fritz Glass, working his craft. Glass Blowing is a very technical art and he was a master craftsman, and was happy to share the process, answer questions, and talk while he worked. His open workshop felt a lot like Resistor, full of the tools of his trade and evidence of current hacking (he also builds his own furnaces!), and it was fascinating to watch the process, so I figured I’d share the video here.
Took a break from the lite brite to make this pornj glowy shirt using coolneon wire. One of many costumes I’ll need for burning man. I’ll probably wear it at the party next week too. Make sure you RSVP!
For Awesome August I’m trying to make something of this ebay toy piano that got smashed by UPS.
The music is Philip Glass’s "Modern Love Waltz," inspired by toy-pianist Margaret Leng Tan
From Engadget
Hazzah! She’s alive! I’ve got a few more tweaks to make before I show you the guts, and then I gotta make lots and lots of pegs.
Gizmodo kicked off their “Summermodo” event yesterday with a post asking if you’re a “nerd that can tan“, and they chose to use this hilarious photo of me and Bre showing off the fangs we made for a Halloween episode of the show that Bre was working on a few years back. I guess there’s nothing quite as pasty as a vampire geek, so kudos to Gizmodo for pulling that photo from the archives.
By a funny coincidence, I’m on a beach vacation for the week, so I figured I should present some photographic evidence that, yes, Resistors (and geeks everywhere) actually can get a tan.
And yes, that is a scene from Super Mario Bros made of seashells beside me. 😉
