ITP Camp 2011

All guitarists aspire one day to have their own signature model guitar.  Instead of waiting for the honor, I decided to bestow it on myself.  This project was designed to be a first stop on a much longer road towards creating an actual playable instrument that may or may not include extended capability (MIDI pick-ups and/or additional functionality.)  Eventually I want to design a guitar in 3DS Max and have it fabricated by a CNC router.  But the first stop on the way to 3D is 2D.  My gateway drug of choice: the laser cutter.  My plan is to design and “print” an original guitar design.

I had never used Illustrator before.  NOT INTUITIVE.

First attempts to create the body.  Ouch.

After a few hours.  No no no!  Thought I might call it a day.  But then…

OK.  A convincing Body.  Running out of time, so more derivative of a Parker Fly than I wanted.  But still…

Add hardware to be etched into 2D body.  Colors were checked and Corrie, Eric and Aiwen helped me get ready for the laser printer.

First one just after being printed!  Pretty amazing.  So much potential.

Here’s the finished Clear Model.  And…

Smoke Black Finish!

Is it wrong for a man to love a machine?  I think not.  Next stop: 3D!

My project was to find a solution for musicians in the NYC area who are looking for other people to play music with, but don’t know where to find them. When I first moved here I tried meeting other musicians on Craig’s List, but it was usually a bad experience. Whether they were just not into the same kind of music as me, or lived too far away, there was usually some problem that better organization could solve.

So that’s what led me to Unsomble. It’s a web app for musicians to post their instrument, burrough, and influences anonymously so that other musicians can get in touch.

It works like this: Musicians click the “Get on the map” button to input their information, along with the public facing info, they will also be asked to provide an email address, so that other musicians can get in touch. But it is not displayed in the front end anywhere, so that email addresses stay private. When a user sees a musician they’d like to get in touch with, they just have to click the “Connect” button, and enter their email and message, and an email will be sent from their address to the hidden email address of the musician on the map. Then, it’s up to that person to get back in touch or not.

As for the quality of the code, in the spirit of the 1-in-1, I took shortcuts, did things less than ideal, and wrote code that makes the web standards part of my soul cry. But it was done from top to bottom in less than 24 hours. I began at 11am (though I spent a few hours on false starts) worked until 7pm, took a break until about midnight, and just finished a few minutes ago, around 4am.

Check it out, but please keep in mind it’s less than ideal!

http://unsomble.com

Inspired by the arts and crafts movement  of the 1890s, with the clean lines and ecologically conscious materials of the modern aesthetic, this table lamp is equally at home as an accent piece or in groups of 20 or 30 as a room’s sole light source.

Its gentle pulsations allude to well-known and widely obtainable arduino-originated sample code, yet are fully customizable to suit the most languid decor or raucous dinner party.

Hand-twisted “stems” add texture and interest, as well as a “lanyard” quality redolent of the lighthearted days of summer in a time gone by.

***

My goal was to reacquaint myself with basic electronic wiring, to build a “hello world” with arduino, and to explore alternatives to store-bought apartment décor.

Well, my goal coming into today was to create a MIDI interface with the Kinect.

I got part of the way there, in that I found a MIDI library that would talk to processing and got a MIDI keyboard to talk with Processing, and in turn affect the color of a rectangle.

I also messed with the Kinect examples, but couldn’t quite get it to the point that I had MIDI and the Kinect working together. I wanted to be able to have the MIDI information somehow affect the output of the Kinect via Processing. I dug apart the Track Multiple Rectangles with Kinect example and the RGB depth test example, and was able to make some minor changes, but what I really wanted to do was be able to track the front and back threshold and affect the color of the camera images using the MIDI messages. Plan to keep at it.

I used VMPK as the MIDI controller, the rwMIDI library, and Processing.

— — — —

MIDI_sprite_example

//Takes MIDI info and converts it to a value and then applies it to the rect fill values

import rwmidi.*;

MidiInput input;
MidiOutput output;

int pitch1;
int pitch2;
int pitch3;

void setup() {
input = RWMidi.getInputDevices()[0].createInput(this);
output = RWMidi.getOutputDevices()[0].createOutput();

}

void noteOnReceived(Note note) {
pitch1 = note.getPitch();
pitch2 = note.getPitch()+2;
pitch3 = note.getPitch()+100;

println(“note on ” + note.getPitch());
}

void sysexReceived(rwmidi.SysexMessage msg) {
println(“sysex ” + msg);
}

void mousePressed() {
int ret =    output.sendNoteOn(0, 3, 3);
ret = output.sendSysex(new byte[] {(byte)0xF0, 1, 2, 3, 4, (byte)0xF7});
}

void draw() {

fill(pitch1, pitch2, pitch3);
rect(30, 20, 55, 55);

}

— — — —

remove Background

//Here I really just changed the background color, and changed the code so that it didn’t extend the Applet. I spent a long time trying to get the thresholds but to no avail.

import java.awt.Rectangle;

import org.openkinect.processing.Kinect;

Kinect kinect;

// Size of kinect image
int w = 640;

int h = 480;

int frontThreshold = 500;

int backThreshold = 800;

int depthXPicOffset = 30;
int depthYPicOffset = 30;

void setup() {

size(w, h);
kinect = new Kinect(this);
kinect.start();
kinect.enableDepth(true);
kinect.enableRGB(true);

// We don’t need the grayscale image in this example
// so this makes it more efficient
kinect.processDepthImage(false);

}

void draw() {

background(100, 100, 100);

loadPixels();

fill(255);

PImage myImage = kinect.getVideoImage();
// Get the raw depth as array of integers
int[] depth = kinect.getRawDepth();
// We’re just going to calculate and draw every 4th pixel (equivalent of 160×120)
int skip = 1;

for (int x = 0; x < w; x += skip) {
for (int y = 0; y < h; y += skip) {
int offset = x + y * w;
int rawDepth = depth[offset];
if (rawDepth > frontThreshold && rawDepth < backThreshold) {
int imageOffset = x – depthXPicOffset + (y + depthYPicOffset) * w;
if (imageOffset < myImage.pixels.length) (pixels[offset] )  = myImage.pixels[imageOffset] ;

}
}
}
updatePixels();

}

void keyPressed() {
if (key == ‘-’) {
frontThreshold–;
} else if (key == ‘=’) {
frontThreshold++;
}
if (key == ‘_’) {
backThreshold–;
} else if (key == ‘+’) {
backThreshold++;
}
if (key == ‘x’) {
depthXPicOffset–;
} else if (key == ‘X’) {
depthXPicOffset++;
}else if (key == ‘y’) {
depthYPicOffset–;
} else if (key == ‘y’) {
depthYPicOffset++;
}
println(“Threshold between:” + frontThreshold + ” and ” + backThreshold + ” depthPicOffset” + depthXPicOffset + ” ” + depthXPicOffset);
}

public void stop() {
kinect.quit();
super.stop();
}

What I got done

For a period of about six months last year I had a bright orange square milk crate as a basket on the back of my bike. I loved it. On New Year’s Eve 2010 someone in their revelry broke the crate’s support, and I came down New Year’s morning to find my beloved crate basket hanging off the back of my bike. There was a barbell in it. A heavy one.
Anyway, sad or strange though that story may be, it is just background.
I took a series of photos of the things that people left in my basket. Food, books, shoes, u-locks, drink glasses, among many other things. For my project today, I recreated my basket as a one page pop-up book.

Do you ever get tired of looking at useful performance graphs and wish you had a popular Internet meme to analyze instead?  Well, LoD Load Monitor is the tool for you.  LoDL Monitor is a bash script that outputs a large ASCII “Look of Disapproval” that changes color and level of discomfort as your system load changes.  To make sure that system load changes sufficiently during execution, LoD Monitor also launches stress-testing to ensure that the user gets the full experience of seeing the face go from blue and neutral to disapproving to the point of unconsciousness and red.

Source code and installation instructions are available at Github.

My project goal today was to actually do something for my Github page; I never make it a practice to put software of any kind there and intend to, so I set out to do something silly for my Github page to motivate me to do more stuff in the future so as to bury this silly ol’ script.

Hello all,

Here is most of my patch.  It works well and I find it fun to explore the space around me with the Kinect and how it changes the sounds, especially the sample playback (I love Marvin Gaye).  I found myself spending a good deal of time just sitting alone, waiving a camera around the room while laughing to myself; not a good first impression.  While the Kinect is fairly limited in the amount of depth information it can gather, this has got me thinking more about exploring and using information from environments as opposed to direct interactions.  Very fun, and I’m definitely glad I stuck around for the 1-in-1.

Andy

It isn’t everything i dreamed of, but i at least have something that will suit my needs until I rewrite everything from scratch. I was able to use the theme atahualpa, which gave me alot of freedom and control, the biggest issues i had were with these buggy plug-ins. It shall do for now.