Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo.

Media artists and design houses around the world: you’ve got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, and elephants.

Just how comfortable are these kids with technology? Comfortable enough that a robotic, killer elephant with glowing eyes is “cute.”

Give them a couple of decades, and I think they’ll invent Cylons. I can’t wait.

Thanks to Kyle McDonald and Memo Akten for sending this my way. As Kyle puts it:

Metaphor: "Could you put it in it’s head like a brain?"
The joy of interactive art: "Ah, that’s so cool!"
The joy of conceptual art: "I love diagrams!"
Hacking consumer devices: "We could just attach it to a remote control car."
Developing scripts: "When sensor is deactivated by…"
The frustration of similarity: "My idea was to do a walking dog!"
There is so much here. This is like the entire media art scene rolled into one six-minute video.

Brilliant.

Now I have to sing “I believe that children are our future…”

More information: Seaweed Studio Workshop

They add in that blog post:

It was interesting to see the contrast between the two groups - the younger ones appear to me more cautious to stay within boundaries of what they have previously seen as they worry about many things being ‘impossible’, which for me was quite unexpected. They had less patience with trying to learn the technological parts, although had a good idea of how the flow of action should be for their ideas. Given a slower teaching pace and a more graphical interface, I believe they would have gained much more control over what was happening.

The fantastic brightness of LED screens makes them one of the pinnacles of display technology for large events and installations. However their relative expense and size makes them inaccessible for smaller venues or budgets.

Enter Evil Mad Scientist’s Peggy LED board. The Peggy 2.0 board allows the 25×25 LED to be addressed individually, and Jay Clegg’s Peggy Video project takes advantage of this, mixing in some Arduino (on CDM)and Processing (on CDM) to create a 625 pixel screen capable of 30FPS, monochrome video.

This isn’t a simple, off-the-shelf solution, and it’s still reasonably expensive: The Peggy boards cost US$95 without LEDs ($190-265 with), but if you want to add LED video to a project, this is probably the best combination of cheap + accessible you’ll find.

Via Make.

Mickey Mann from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

MATTI NIINIMÄKI, aka Original Hamsters, has been hacking away with the fantastic new, open-source animation package Animata. Using OpenSoundControl (OSC), he can control live animation with two other open source tools: “Pure Data” Pd (which opens up all sorts of other sonic and control capabilities) and the Arduino controller platform. The proprietary but beloved Max/MSP works, too.

Translation: if you want a Mickey Mouse ViewMaster controlling live animation (top), Animata is your tool of choice.

Matti is really doing us a huge favor, as a lot of the OSC calls aren’t actually documented yet. Full tutorials here, found via CDM comments:

How to Control Animata With OSC from Max/MSP and Pure Data [Original Hamsters]

You can see some of the results in the videos here. The students and faculty of Finland’s University of Lapland all hang out on Vimeo, too:

http://vimeo.com/groups/ulapland

I think the ability to use Animata’s smart tools for setting up puppet-like characters should be especially nice. And yes, someone rightfully took issue with me calling this “3D,” but technically speaking, it is a 3D engine, even if the elements being used here are 2.5D or even 2D. Now, that said, I’d love to see some real 3D models in this engine, too – not to knock the deep creative possibilities of working with 2D models, but both should have some potential.

Pure Data to Animata with OSC from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

It’s been a couple of months since Peter mentioned MachineCollective - the open, DIY modular controller enclosure system - on CDMu, and they haven’t been sitting on their hands during that time. MachineCollective.org has been updated with lots of new pictures and information, and they’ve even dropped a potential price point: €25-35.

Despite a couple of visualist-specific controllers - Ohm, VMX VJ, NuVJ - we generally have to make our controller choices from the gear designed for electronic musicians. We see a lot of inventive combinations of hardware and software solutions for VJing, but we also need some good, accessible, basic setups to actually get new people in to performing live visuals. We need more hardware, which means we need more people making prototypes, some of which will eventually become commercial solutions for the next generation.

Let’s get going, people. Ready? Go!

DIY on CDMo, DIY on CDMu.
Arduino site (Previously on CDMo).
Arduinome site.

… and if you’ve already been working on custom control options for VJing, tell us about it, so we can tell everyone else.

Soldering is strangely addictive, like knitting for tech geeks. Maybe it’s the solder fumes, but I find myself oddly relaxed. The other big surprise is that it’s really far easier than beginners think. (Read: I’m a klutz. If I can do it, so can you.) And there are plenty of good visualist hacker projects to which you can apply your skill, from the Arduino to video switchers and synthesizers and other sensor-to-computer rigs for DIY VJ controllers or distance-sensing 3D animator thingies.

But the one soldering mountain even hardware DIYers seem not to fear is surface-mount soldering. It requires a lot more precision, and has a far greater potential to destroy an expensive component (partly because it’s trickier, and partly because you’re more likely to be doing it with something pricier).

Sparkfun, purveyors of cool DIY gadgetry and raiders of credit cards (at least mine), have a terrific tutorial on SMD:

Sparkfun Tutorials (scroll down for multi-part SMD knowledge written in a beginner-friendly style)

I hear you. You’re still not sure you won’t screw this up. It’s easier to watch it being done than hear it explained, so watch a soldering ninja at work in this new Sparkfun tutorial video:

Perfect for assembling your own Arduino and creating a new Processing visual project. Stay tuned; I’ve got some new projects for March and April that I’ll finally get to document here on CDMo.