Steve Cooley Fine Art

Modern Device has a *really* sweet electronics kit for $15 that has most of the Arduino functionality at about half the price. What’s even better is that it’s about 1/3 smaller than the arduino board. Also, it now has 6 pulse width modulators due to it using an upgraded version of the microcontroller chip than the older one I had. What’s really fantastic is that this kit goes together really easily, and if you buy 10 of them, the price drops to $10 a piece… ! And it’s still an arduino! So the programming environment is cross platform and open source… just like the hardware!

So, you know me, I timelapsed me soldering it together.

Now, I’m almost completely lame at soldering, and it took me an hour to put together. If I had a bit more practice, I bet I could get that time down considerably.

Technorati Tags: arduino

Robert Hodgin makes me want to put my laptop down and just surrender already. Cripes. Robert, you’re makin’ it really hard for the rest of us, sheesh!

I’m doubling up. In addition to our PD/OSC/Processing/Quartz Composer session, I’ll also be doing at least one session on how to build things in Second Life. There’s a possibility that I’ll be doing multiple sessions, so I may get to go into some scripting in addition to covering the basics of building. Depending on conditions, I may present some comparisons to Google’s SketchUp. Anyway, I hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: diy, make, makerfaire, makerfaire2007, second life

Hey, I’m going to be doing an exhibit of new work in Oakland this saturday night. Jono is also playing a live electronic music set and will be the official photographer of the night. Below is the info:

March 24th 07
Bay Area Collective Designers

2639 E.9th St, Oakland CA, 94601
Arrive early for good parking!
$8 before 11pm, $10 after

AMODA is having a laptop battle in conjunction with the SXSW 2007 festival. If you’re going to be in the Austin area, check it out:

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

The Mohawk (912 Red River)
9pm-2am
$7 general; $4 for members
18 and up

Technorati Tags: AMODA, SXSW2007

Yesterday, Derek and I made the short trek up to Menlo Park to Techshop for the Maker Faire 2007 try-outs. We’re proposing to show off what we’re doing with Pure Data, Processing, and OSC to communicate between the two.

• Got there with about 7 minutes to spare before out time slot to present
• TOTALLY forgot there would be a camera crew there
• NOT mentally prepared for bright lights and big audience
• Computer Network acted more like a not-work, therefore, an actual demo did not work, whee!
• Did not completely biff the presentation.
• Did get great support and questions from Dale Dougherty and team.
• Met several people from the south bay who stepped up properly after I lamented in front of the audience that south bay electronic artists are hard to find.
• Horrifyingly intimidated to see today what some of the other people presented before we showed up. Good lord.
• very glad the day went exactly the way it did, we had minimal time to freak out about the entire situation before our presentation, and didn’t really have time to change our minds and back out.

And now… we wait to get a call back to see if we’re in. And while we wait, we continue to develop what we presented.

Technorati Tags: dobox, doboxrecordings, make, makerfaire, makerfaire2007, processing, osc, puredata, stevecooley, techshop

My machine froze up while I was writing this on the 24th of january, and I thought I lost it. Turns out I didn’t. Yay, Ecto.

Quartz Composer: Fun, Easy, and Frustrating!:
… I want to see my code as lines of text, not as a jumble of tangled cords…

In all fairness, this is before I discovered the node-draggy equivalent of a for-loop, but still, it can get out of hand really quickly. Not to mention that I spend about half the time moving the boxes around to get a nice composition. I am detail driven so I want all the boxes to be equally spaced and aligned.So I really dont know how to feel about it.
…
Let me think about it for another week and I will get back to you.

I can agree with your findings 100%. The best piece of advice I can give you is to check out patches, figure out what you can build by making parts of your routine modular, and… maybe there are things you can pass into javascript and do some more robust things there?

Quartz Composer:

distracting… indeed.

Technorati Tags: fine art, quartz composer

click on this image below:

I got a new mac book pro for work. Sort of had to break it in with something for it to chew on. If you’re not on a mac, well.. get one and you can see what this is.

ok ok, here are some screen grabs:

Technorati Tags: apple, quartz composer

This is what it looks like when you get PD on a PC to talk to Processing on a mac.

Technorati Tags: art, processing, PD

This is way cool. Because Processing understands quicktime, you can run quartz composer clips inside of Processing sketches. When you take a sketch that takes a live video feed inside of processing like this:

and you substitute the live video for a quartz composer clip like this:

You get this! Ta-dah:

Now, of course the processing power of your machine will dictate how fast your sketch renders, but this is a triviality in the long run. Today I’m running the sketch as fast as I can, and then rendering each frame out to … wait for it.. a Quicktime movie! Thanks as usual to Daniel Shiffman for his Movie Maker quicktime authoring library for processing.

Technorati Tags: apple, processing, processing.org, quartz composer