Robotspeak video window (Director’s Cut) from Donald Bell on Vimeo.

Take on Make Controller Kit, one copy of Max/MSP/Jitter, one ultrasonic sensor (deliciously superior to infrared sensors in my opinion), a projector, and a storefront window on Lower Haight in San Francisco, add in some music tech shop geeks, and you get some good fun.

Andrew Cavette shot the video. With all the flashy, sexy documentation videos claiming to be the Future of Everything, it’s nice to see a warts-and-all rockumentary of geeks mucking about with tech. The spot has a special place in my heart, too — it’s San Francisco’s truly awesome music geek boutique, Robotspeak.

And yes, simple interactive installations can be a lot of fun. So if you’ve been putting off installation ideas because you’ve been getting overly complex, don’t overlook the basics - it’s always the best place to start. (Incidentally, you can use an ultrasonic sensor with the much-cheaper Arduino. Total cost easily under US$50.) Enjoy!

Today on CDMusic, I’m looking at the new OpenStomp, an open source guitar stompbox. That’s the project’s main focus, but dig into the specs, and you find something interesting: an NTSC output. There’s even an example patch with Pong. Using visual programming tools, it should be possible to whip up more.

More on the video is found in the FAQ:

Video is essentially generated in software by the Propeller with a little bit of hardware support. Parallax’s website has drivers supporting both PAL and NTSC. The initial focus will be on NTSC, and the video based pieces of software (like Pong) shipping with the pedal are NTSC based, but conversion to PAL is possible and is supported by the Propeller chip and the Coyote-1 hardware.

It’s just a start, and there’s no video output. But how much fun would it be to have a custom, US$350 video stompbox you could code for? Because the project is open source, and it’s based on the cheap but powerful Parallax Propeller, it should be very possible. Anyone interested in working on such a project, do let us know.

[CDMu Story | Project Page, Details, Online Ordering]

Ooh, and I see below our related posts feature is working nicely … so, yeah, see also those stories.