Well, I finally got new LEDs in, thanks to the nice people at Renoylds Electronics, who shipped another batch of LEDs after the first got lost in transit. I replaced the LEDs currently on the yoyo with OED-EL-1L2s, which have a 60 degree beam angle. This seems to have made a ton of difference, as the drawing program now makes tricks identifiable, especially with the scribbles where hold points are.

For instance, a sleeper:

sleeper

And a trapeze:

trap

Next step is getting all of this out of Max/MSP and into either PD or OpenFrameworks, as my Max demo license ran out and I'm not throwin' down the cash until they finally announce their pricing scheme for Max 5.


Taking some inspiration from Johnny Chung Lee's WiiMote Projects, I decided I'd like to figure out something neat to do with the WiiMote's IR Camera. I didn't realize that it's 1024x768 @ 100hz for up to 4 IR points (with 4 bits of depth, even), which gives you enough resolution to do some interesting stuff.

yoyoproject

For those of you that haven't known me a while, you might not be aware that I used to yoyo quite a bit. I still play every so often, but not nearly as much as I used to. I ended up building up quite the collection, though. Something I always wanted to be able to do was yoyo tracking. I played a little bit with blob tracking and LEDs, but didn't have the hardware or experience back then (2000-2001ish) to really do what I wanted.

yoyoproject 005

After seeing the head tracking and finger tracking videos, the first thing I thought of was trying the yoyo project again. Without taking the time to actually look at my collection, I decided to drill up an old freehand pog and electric tape it to my Pyro with a CR2032 pack attached to the back of the pog for power.

yoyoproject 006

This ended up being such a colossally bad idea that I'm not gonna spend much time talking about it. The yoyo was unusably unbalanced. So, digging through my yoyo box somemore, I realized I still had some Torch LED pogs.

yoyoproject 009

I removed the Red LED off of these and replaced it with an IR LED and a smaller resistor. Since I didn't really have any Spintastics yoyos I wanted to throw the pog in, I ended up dismantling my already sort of broken Night Moves 2 (the plastic on the axle end had cracked on it a while ago for some reason), and hot gluing the pog in to hold it. Sure enough, the yoyo was slightly unbalanced, but completely usable for most any trick. After ninja starring the pog due to not having hot glued it well enough the first time, I made sure to do a better job, and now I have an IR yoyo!

yoyoproject 010

So, with yoyo+wiimote setup finished, I fired up Max/MSP and used the aka.objects wiiremote and appleremote externals along with the LCD object to make a little drawing program. The Apple Remote works as a pen start/stop and clearing device, so I can clear the screen and start/stop drawing while standing far back from the computer. The Wiimote external is wired to draw lines depending on the first IR readout from the camera.

gerbil

The above picture is a drawing from that program, of an almost-but-not-really version of the "skin the gerbil" trick by Doctor Popular.

The picture also shows a couple of the current problems with the system. First off, I've completely trashed my office getting this done, so I can't back up very far and don't have a good idea of what the Wiimote is seeing. This could be fixed by calibration, which is something I plan on figuring out. Secondly, there's some sampling issue with large swings. Either my swings are causing tilt, the LED doesn't have a wide enough angle, or some combination of the two. I've ordered 5 more kinds of LEDs to test this.

patchpic

Finally, I hooked up a little sample looper in Max/MSP to the setup so that it would spit out some noise, too.

This video is a combination of the drawing and the video, processed through Jitter. Warning, the sound is VERY desynchronized from the video. 100% of my experience with Jitter has happened in the last 24 hours, and apparently I missed something about getting the video to synchronize (realtime setting, maybe?), which is why the sound doesn't match the video.

So, that was my weekend. The project still has a long way to go. I've got 2 more Torch boards to mod once the LEDs come in, and it'll be interesting to see which LEDs work best. I should have those later this week. I also plan on modding a spintastics top I have that has a torch board in it, so I can do Augmented Reality Battle Tops.

Have any interesting ideas for this project? Please leave comments! Seems like there's a million places this could go.


The week of getting half-done projects to 3/4th done continues.

GENTLEMEN, BEHOLD:

Twitter Breakcore

twittercore

I created this back in September, when I was taking my Max/MSP classes at RobotSpeak. I decided to try layering twitter public timeline messages run through text-to-speech over fairly simple looped break samples, because noise + noise = noise.

Unfortunately, either Py/Ext or flite~ is causing Max/MSP to crash about 20-30 minutes in, regularly, so having a full time stream running is a bit of an issue right now. However, I made a small 2.5 minute track.

"actively gnawing on some guy's head" (MP3, 2:20)

Lyrics:

systems over single channel, IP

Have fun and be safe. Happy New Year to you too. xx

Bob Sinclar Ft Steve Edwards - World Hold On (David Guetta And Joachim Garraud Remix)

Night Night everyone!!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

comiendo pizza con cerveza de tercio..... perfect

, do you ever get to see the wildlife?

the internet by design is a communications platform. the goal is to put old communications systems over single channel, IP

Back from dinner. Answering a few emails then watching Helvetica.

Christmas Cheer? MST3k Santa #521 on Google Video

mmmmm..... Ribs :). Lol

Back in Columbus. Found 5 dead roaches in my apartment. Bleh.

no run. GB Hogg to SC Ganguly, no run, fuller and on the off, driven hard but straight to cover

no run. MG Johnson to SR Tendulkar, no run, full and outside the off, left alone, this one doesn't bounce too much and scoots along to t ...

posteando

Spacetime Continuum - Kairo (Carl Craig Mix)

Helpful Tip: Don't let your brother-in-law take you to "I Am Legend."

Rosie - Another Rosie Christmas

Baby break dancing!

when am i coming by for pie again?

contestando mails de laburo :(

I love spark people ! Haha. Going to sleep soon.

Went to Kohl's tonight... I don't even know why I bother with that place.

Borre bastantes twiteros ke no twiteaban como hace 1 o 2 meses!...

congratulations on your laptop!

is it just me or does firefox seem to get less and less stable with every patch?

In San Jose, Ca

queda una no tan larga noche por delante.

"Arguments with furniture are rarely productive."

To be fair, it was actively gnawing on some guy's head when they shot it.

i'm in ur eharmonies, communicatin' wif ur matches.



I was just gonna paste the videos together, and then I decided "Maybe some music would be nice", and two hours later, here I am. I'm pretty happy with the result, though.