For those who didn’t make it to the last get-together. Here’s a picture from beneath the Huberman sphere for the swollenballs piece, with the reciprocating weight (bottle full of water) in the background.
Now if we can just get a servo-activated clutch and winch motor to control the lifting and sudden descent of the bottle, we’ve got it nailed.
Here’s a pic of just a few of the phones which just arrived for the pipedreams exhibit as per the plan I hatched when I was in the states.
And here’s the rest of them. 16 in all.
I’ve rigged the other half on a bit of the springthing rubber to get an idea of the dimensions and the look of the thing.
Still very keen on the aluminium ceiling grid idea, and spoke to a supplier today who’s happy to help make things safe. Might not be all that expensive - especially if I can get second hand. No source of this material yet.
The other idea knocking around is just weaving a kind of web or grid out of phone wire. Not so keen on this, but it might be made to work.
Lastly one of my housemates (when I showed him the demo) pointed out that BT did something involving pipes you speak into for the Dome. This is news to me, and I couldn’t google it, but if anyone knows more…
This is rather fun - Burning visible images onto CD-Rs - it takes images and creates a data file that when burnt to a CD will show that image when held up to the light!
I’ve been wondering if that could be a good take-away exhibit piece. We’d have a camera which took people’s photo (probably in black & white), then we’d then have some mechanism for loading a CD-R into a burner (or a hand) - burn the image (perhaps with some take home material about the exhibit) and out it’d pop! It’d be neat if it was like a toaster - like the mechanism in the old Apple Cube.
See to all curiosity collective blog posts about the puppet, including the original posting with the video prototype or click the image to see the movie.
The makezine video linked below comments about using the apple level meter to build puppets - so it looks like David and Craig are finally on the map.
Looks like there might be an opportunity to bring this one back to life.
The idea was to have a box in which a creature appears to be stirring, making mewing noises and moving the box about.
It links to the ‘curiosity killed the cat’ idea, and also Schrodinger’s cat, possibly using the Peppers ghost illusion to switch between states of being alive or being dead.
It looks as if an upcoming Ip Art public invitation may be presented for anyone who can submit an art piece which fits in a shoebox.
Alex Healing has pointed me to this amazing video of an easter egg in HP Scanjet scanners.
[I thought this was rather cool to perhaps try out on the ol’ HP scanner hanging about. I noticed that the PC with the SCSI card got taken away recently though, any ideas? ; ) Alex]
We have one of these in work. I wonder if this might be a possible presentation as part of the upcoming exhibition if Alex is keen to get it to work, and somebody has an old PC with SCSI support.
More documentation of of scanjet music can be found here.
Lots of good work last night, especially some of the new project ideas. It’s on its way.
These are just some notes about how I managed to get Pd to build, with the Gem library, and demonstrate two realtime video streams as described by Vade on the pd mailing list.
I am documenting this because there are many confusing resources in support of pd.
All of the efforts I’ve encountered on the web are valuable. These various initiatives maintain versions of pd for different OS, create additional pd libraries for extra capabilities, and pre-bundle distributions with built-in libraries. However, this creates a thicket for newbies.
The wellspring for pd, the guy in charge of the pd core, is Miller Puckette. The latest releases of pd code can be found at the less than memorable URL http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html.
This is where I picked up the source for pd v0.39-2. Version 0.39 or above was required for compatibility with my version of Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger). The pd-extended releases were too old and didn’t help.
Pd depends on TclTk for windowing, which is available for the Mac from the TclTkAqua sourceforge site. Version 8.4.9 was the last version which is verified to work with pd. I didn’t try the more recent one.
Building Miller Puckette’s pd v0.39-2 then gave me a minimal installation of pd.
To execute pd, I had to cd into the /bin directory of the pd distribution, because otherwise it can’t find the pd.tk file. So finally I ran
./pd
and it worked, but complained that gem and pmpd weren’t there (because they are not by default part of pd).
N.B. This minimal installation doesn’t have all the libraries built into it that exist in the pd-extended distribution. You have to get them yourself.
Gem v0.90 was acquired from the gem sourceforge site. It provides additional capabilities to wire in video and 3d visuals to the pd programming model.
To use Gem, you must drop the pre-built libraries for your platform (mine was called Gem.pd_darwin) into the /extra/ directory inside the pd distribution.
Vade kindly created a demo pd program which would enable dual head rendering of two videos (assuming your video card supports video acceleration on its external video port - they don’t all do this).
In addition to Miller Puckette’s site, there are also important (and uncoupled?) initiatives to document, bundle and promote pd at http://pd.iem.at/ http://puredata.info/ http://pure-data.sourceforge.net/ http://at.or.at/hans/pd and many more.
A webring has been forged to bind them all http://pd.klingt.org/webring/ but this doesn’t really help to overcome the complexity.
Take a simple example. When following the pd-extended thread of this web, from http://puredata.info/downloads/ I found myself at this page, which seems to suggest (at time of writing) that the latest version is 0.38-0test4HCS4.
The full list of sourceforge downloads for the pure-data sourceforge project is more useful, but also suggests that pd (pure-data) is at version 0.38.1
However, when contacting the pd-list, it turns out that pd itself is well beyond release version 0.39-2, and even pd-extended has tagged cvs branches running beyond 0.39 in cvs .
Attempts to build any versions lower than 0.39 turned out to be fruitless on my OS version, so this was critical information.
Although this isn’t a restriction of our work, a lot of the pieces under development are interactive systems, which incorporate sensing, multimedia, and actuators. Some of the technologies behind these systems are listed below.
Pd (notes) - a realtime multimedia system allowing live and recorded input to be manipulated and transformed, the open source version of Max/MSP.
Gem - 3d and video facilities for Pd
Processing - a java based easy editing and deployment environment for multimedia work
JSyn - a java library which allows java manipulation of sound devices and sound streams (the basis for the Sonia Processing library)
Parallax Basic Stamp
and Microchip Pic - microprocessors suitable for sensing and automation
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Hi Everyone, OK this is my first twisted map. I’ve taken the driving times from Ipswich to coastal towns in the UK and morphed the map accordingly. There are a bunch of things I need to fix, but I’d realy like to hear what you think. Cheers, Dave |
Virtualised puppets controlled by accelerometers. Click on image above to see a movie of the first prototype.