The piano box is a (somewhat polyphonic) paper toy synthesizer with 12 keys, each triggering a tone and an LED. The keys are a set of capacitive sensors, made of copper tape, controlled by an Arduino Mega running the CapSense and Tone libraries. The code for this project, written by Will Byrd and Catarina Mota, can be downloaded here. Please note that the current version of the Tone library has some problems on Arduino 1.0. so it’s best to use version 23 or earlier.
I just finished Pentametron: a twitter bot that sifts through about 5 million tweets a day, collecting just the ones that happen to be in iambic pentameter. The result is a sort of collective nonsense poem from the internet’s endless flows of language. You can follow Pentametron in realtime on twitter – @pentametron – or read the collected tweets in sonnet form at pentametron.com, updated several times per hour.
Pentametron is written in PHP and uses @fennb’s Phirehose library to access twitter’s streaming API at a rate of 40-60 tweets per second.
Get that Club Mate cold and those soldering irons hot because it’s time for another Interactive Show! We’re putting out the call to hackers around the globe to come show your stuff at our annual party.
This years theme: Physical meets digital. Think kinect-controlled robots, or video game elements brought into the real world, or crowd-sourced smartphone accelerometer collaborations. As always anything interactive applies so use your imagination.
We’re targeting mid-May so there’s plenty of time to get involved. If you’re interested in participating drop us a line.
I recently acquired an early 1900’s Gundlach 4×5 view camera with a few lenses and designed an adapter to mount a modern DSLR body where the film plane would go. There is no lens connected to the SLR — the 4×5 lens images directly onto the CMOS sensor. The bracket design is thing:18989 and can likely be adapted for other field or monorail cameras. There are some limitations with the design, but it works acceptably well in practice.
Come learn how to create websites with Alexis this Saturday. She’ll walk you through step-by-step and get you creating your Web 2.0 foundations in no time using an open source code editor.
A few months ago we put together a little team to enter the Jello Mold Competition at Gowanus Studio Space. The team members were me, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Astrida Valigorsky, and Mimi Hui. After a false start or two, we ended up making a working toy piano out of jello (and some electronics). You can see them in action on the videos below.
As part of our experiments we realized that jello and fruit, which contain a lot of water, are conductive. Embedded in each jello/fruit key is a sterling silver pin (food safe) connected to an Arduino microcontroller underneath the piano’s base. Below the piano’s case is another sterling silver pin. With this setup, the JelTone can either be played with a metal utensil connected to the Arduino, gloves enhanced with conductive thread, or bare hands by touching both a key and the piano’s case.
If you’d like to make your own, you can get the project files, code and instructions from Thingiverse.
Do you want to add computer vision to your project? Do you want to make your own 3D images, vision-based musical instrument using a kinect, or teach your robot how to follow a ball? In this class Ingenuitas, the maker’s of SimpleCV, will give you an introduction to performing computer vision with python. We will cover the basics of computer vision and provide a brief introduction to python. This 2.5 hour class will start with a 90 minute tutorial, followed by an hour of demos where we will show you how a number of awesome projects that were made in just an afternoon. We will conclude with an hour or more of open instruction where we work on projects and the instructor will provide discussion relevant to student interest and one on one feedback. Students should bring a laptop with SimpleCV installed and a web cam or Microsoft Kinect. Students should install SimpleCV and python before attending and bring either a web cam or Microsoft Kinect.
While uploading a model to thingiverse, I noticed an ultra cute Cthulhu and had to print it immediately on the Makerbot at NYC Resistor. Then I had an idea that the same process that generates the gcode shells for the makerbot could be used to generate slices to be cut on the laser cutter. Continue reading »
