Lapse, links, lots

This is Nate, and it has been a little while. I'm starting my Masters at MSU in a couple weeks, and have started so many projects at the same time, I'm experiencing a bit of a bottleneck in my production of work. Among the many projects, a couple of them we're outlining on this other blog I have with some good friends at MSU:

http://folio2-avclub.blogspot.com/

Projects like a voyeuristic lobby recording button, general networking stuff, and of course, my robot ball project that has taken such a distant back-burner. Other projects include my friend Dave's Sampolin project, using graphite's excellent semi-conductive properties to make an analog controller for creating a software version of Laurie Anderson's Tape-violin thing; an installation piece that will go on my friend's wall soon(ish); and fixing all the electronic things that are broken in our new house.

With the existence of the other blog, I'll double-post between these two as appropriate, but I'm not sure how often it will be appropriate, so I'll just do my best to do a lot and document even more : )

Ears as drivers

Ok, so this post is the result of a few things I hadn't gotten to work before. I don't know much about Java, so embedding this Processing applet in this blog is a big step for me. : )



This is me playing around with Processing to try to draw a picture to show my brother how I wanted to use amplitude information from the two mics on the sides of our ball project. Left is white, Right is red, and the difference between the length in the two lines makes the ball turn. It needs to stop listening when it gets too close, or when the difference is too small, and it will.

Processing uses very similar coding to Arduino, the hardware microcontroller system I like to use, so writing code in one gets me closer to having code in the other. : ) fun

Click on the window! (if it actually shows up, that is. :) ) clicking represents a sound happening in that field.

Source code: wood_move3

My Girls with an accelerometer

Last week, I finally got to play with an accelerometer for the first time. This accelerometer will tell the system when it's upright, and help it balance, or at least that's the plan. I need to spend more time with it, and with sequencing the reading and writing from the accelerometer and to the motor transistors, but so far I had some fun rigging it up with a Pd patch, using the new USB BUB board and latest BareBonesBoard, both from moderndevice.com.
ps. - I'm glad the USB BUB board exists now, for a nice easy way to get the USB connectivity I like for Arduino-Pd stuff, using a cable people could buy off the shelf, not like the old solution for BBBs, a TTY USB adapting cable that was sort of expensive and easy to hook up backwards.

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Anyway, this video is what I did. Thanks for the code:
http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2007/12/arduino-with-radio-shack-parallax.html
I changed it a little to give Pd messages I'm used to working with (I'm sure there are better ways to send this information serially, but this seems fast enough) and rigged it up to control the volume and playback speed of a loop of Animal Collective's "My Girls." Fun Fun : )

Bike chain

I wanted to attach a bike gear to the main driving motor of the robot ball, and have it drive against a bike chain mounted around the inside of the ball. I learned about bike chain tools - used to break and mend bike chains to adjust their lengths and remove or replace bike chains - and took apart my old bike.

thanks: http://www.laseralignment.net/lasertips.html

I took it all apart, almost broke my dad's tool from using it incorrectly, and found the chain to be just what I need, although heavy. I may end up buying a plastic one, should this one be very much too heavy.

So, next I took apart the back wheel to try to separate the smallest gear from the rest, and found I should have done a little more research before so completely disassembling the back wheel. The gears aren't put together in a way that will facilitate my taking a single one very easily, so I'm going to just buy one, probably from smallparts.com *shrug*