I made a card for a friend. I didn’t want to give just any old, boring card so I decided to add some pretty lights into it. This was the result:
(more…)
Forays into GPS
I’m really interested in aviation and lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of making a glass cockpit. This is a big project and most of my time will probably be spent on it. There are a lot of different systems for the glass cockpit like an IMU, an MCU to take in sensor data, a display for showing information and much more.
I’m starting off the project by working on understanding GPS. I’ve managed to make my own (albeit bulky) GPS receiver that shows coordinates, speed, altitude and heading:
(more…)
Reign in Awesome
What you see is a fluorescent light bulb being lit up wirelessly by the Slayer Exciter.
(more…)
Maker Faire Adventures and More!
Cats! Cats! Cats! Cats!
The Sound Revolver (SR) was accepted to make an appearance at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire but before I went there, I thought I would do a couple of things. One, go to Calgary to visit an old friend and fix his Nintendo and two, visit a class of grade 3/4 kids and talk about the SR.
(more…)
New Project!
Remember the Augmented Music Maker? It has gone through some changes and also has a new name! It is now called “The Sound Revolver” and now has its own project page. You can check it out here!.
Forays into PureData
PureData (Pd) is a graphical programming interface that’s very similar to Max/MSP. I’ve linked a patch with openFrameworks using the Open Sound Control Protocol (OSC). Here’s the result below:
Geek Flair
A little while ago, I added a couple of new “firsts” to my lists. One was buying something from Etsy and the other was finally buying something from Adafruit. I bought a messenger bag from CrawlSpace Studios through Etsy and I decided that having just a bag would be a bit boring, so why not add some electronics to it?
(more…)
Building Bridges and Breaking Them
Recently, I had the pleasure of being a committee member for the annual bridge building contest hosted by Science Adventures Yukon and the Association of Professional Engineers of Yukon. Each year, students from schools throughout the Yukon (mostly Whitehorse) build bridges out of wooden coffee stir sticks, glue and dental floss and put them to a loading test. This year, we had about 100 beautiful bridges competing. My job (among others) was simple: keep adding weights to them until they break.
All these bridges ready to face their demise…
Augmented Music Making
Notice: The Sound Revolver (Augmented Music Maker) now has its own project page which you can find here!
I have mentioned before that I am really interested in musical interfaces. I have also been working with openCV a lot lately and (naturally) I wanted to merge the two concepts together. A while ago, I came across the reactable, a really neat synthesizer that makes use of blocks you place on a special table top to create sounds. I really loved that idea of augmentation and I wanted to make something similar. I haven’t come up with a name for this project yet so I’ll use AMM (Augmented Music Maker) as a placeholder name for now.
Edit: Thanks to a wonderful class of grade 3/4 students, the official name for AMM is now “The Sound Revolver.”
(more…)
Forays into openCV
Computer Vision (CV) is pretty awesome. It reminds me that while we humans can easily understand what we’re looking at, it’s way way harder for the computer to be at our level of understanding:
Us: We see a hand!
Computer: What’s a hand? I just see two blobs.
(more…)