Steve Cooley Fine Art

hey, check out what my friend Joel has been up to using a wiimote and infrared LEDs: a virtual theremin with DJ scratching ability!

http://bit.ly/9i0a3z

On display at Heart Of Chaos – “Uproar 2009″ show at first street billiards:

I can’t even begin to tell you how big the puddle of drool is in front of me after watching this video. But, ouch, that pricetag!

I’m beginning to formulate how I would implement a data logger for airlock bubbling activity in a primary fermentation vessel. I’m not exactly sure how I will take a sensor reading from an airlock yet. In a 1 piece double chamber airlock, I could try putting a photo interrupt sensor where the carbon dioxide blows into the second chamber… not sure if that’ll work at all. In a 3-piece airlock, I could try to record up and down movement of the internal piece by bouncing a light beam or something off the top? I dunno exactly what to do. Something tells me I may end up fabricating something else. Simpler is better, so I’ll have to think long and hard about it. In the meantime, I think this is the workflow of data capture and reporting, using an Async Labs WiShield:

I just went to reorder sliders I had *very* expensively and carefully vetted out of a small crowd of contenders only to discover that mouser.com had run out of their on-hand stock of over 1200 pieces. I think it would be totally insane to try to keep vetting new hardware and redesigning my circuit boards based around an inconsistent supply of components. So, I’m thinking about moving to a modular “sled” kind of design for sliders so that I can keep my circuit board in a static configuration and be able to plug and play whatever sliders I’m able to get my hands on when I need to replicate my project. Here’s a preliminary sketch:

While making my Beatseqr project, I’ve been trying to find a reliable source for some faders / sliders / slide pots / slide action potentiometers, and I’ve been having a challenging time finding exactly what I want. So I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. Click on through to get a crazy large dose of science. Continue reading ‘HOWTO find and buy faders / sliders / slide pots / slide potentiometers’ »

Vibeke B has a great solution to multicasting OSC from external data sources to multiple OSC receivers inside QC:

Sending OSC to multiple OSC receivers on the same port

Yea thanx for helping me. I think it solved my problem actually. I don’t think I can send OSC messages from another app (modul8) to QC on ip 0.0.0.0. It might intentionally only be working inside the QC environment. At least I could not get that working.

But I found a way around it like this:

I send a msg from Modul8:

Modul8 ip 127.0.0.1 port 9000 -> QC OSC receiver on port 9000 (one comp receives this)

This message is only received by one OSC receiver even if the receiver is in every one of my QC comps (as we found out earlier). I then put a small osc rerouter in every comp. Whenever a message is received on 127.0.0.1 i put it into a sender that resends it on ip 0.0.0.

QC 0.0.0.0.0 port 9001 -> QC receiver on port 9001 (all comps receive this)

Then because the message is sent from within QC on ip 0.0.0.0 I get the desired result: All active QC comps receive the message.

Just too good not to repost… such an important piece of information if you’re doing anything with OSC inside quartz composer.

original post:
http://kineme.net/

And here’s the quartz composer list email:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Quartzcomposer-dev/

Congrats to Sonya Paz on being named the artist of the year for the 11th Senate District of California! I used to work with Sonya at Adobe way back in the day, and have enjoyed seeing her bring her whole game to my hometown of Campbell. I couldn’t imagine it happening to a nicer person, yay!
Check out her website at http://www.sonyapaz.com/…

Hey me and my group are playing a live electronic improvised jam session. Two shows, actually. Tonight at Works/San Jose and then next friday night at South First Billiards on the same street as Works… Check out the details here:

Hope you can make it to one or the other!

Update: I’ve written a huge post on how to buy sliders/faders/slide potentiometers

As copiously stated, I have no formal training in electronics, and I’ve reached a mature enough age that I can no longer accept an electronic component as a black box, so when I come across a device and can figure out how to use it without being able to locate instructions, i feel like it’s only right to make a drawing of it and try to explain my hypothesis for how it works.

With that being said, here’s my best guess at how the 10k slide potentiometers (sliders / slide pot) works:

the 3 pin slide potentiometer (10k)

The obvious control at the top sets the resistance. The voltage in (V+) and ground (V-) pins run inline with each other, and the resistance value is read from the pin adjacent to the voltage in pin. I’m using an Arduino to read the value, and in my case, i actually needed an additional resistor in front of the voltage in pin to limit the incoming current. When i hooked the slider up directly to the arduino, it didn’t work very well, acting way more like it was a logarithmic curve potentiometer than the linear curve pot I thought it was. About 2 minutes later, it was blistering hot. Too hot to touch, actually! So, I quickly disconnected it from the arduino and added a 10k resistor in front of the voltage in, and then it started behaving much more reasonably. The values I was getting from the 10k slider were not what I was expecting, so I’ll have to dial back on the current resistor from 10k to maybe 1k and see if that helps get the values from the slide pot more inline with my expectations.