Prodical’s Blog

It’s been a while since my last blog post – so this is an overdue round-up of what’s been keeping me busy.

It feels like I’ve been focusing on Processing to the exclusion of anything else for sometime… and not just my own creative development… but also all the time and energy I’ve been investing into InProcess:ing – the open forum for sharing creative coding and practice at Madlab.

Don’t get me wrong… I lurve Processing… but I think it’s time to take a bit of a breather and outline ideas and strategies to move forward with new opportunities and other creative ideas that have been bubbling on my back-burner for a while…

Themes include:

1. KiNoSeq – a kinetic nodal sequencer for the iPad
2. Fun with Arduino
3. PEAL ‘Hand Bells’
4. The Augmented Tonoscope
5. shado – monome widgets
6. Dirty Electronics – Skull Etching
7. ‘Analogue is the new Digital’ exhibition

Some of these are relatively brief and included within this post – others are more substantial so I’ve opened up a separate post in their own right.

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I’ve been following Hans Kuder’s flexible, nodal music sequencer Tiction for a while – and while there’s not been much development recently – I think it has plenty of unrealised potential. So much so that I’ve been thinking about how to develop an original application – one inspired by Tiction – but that realises the multi-touch capabilities of the iPad.

There are other emerging nodal sequencing applications – most notably:

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In recent posts I flagged up some possible next stage developments for my Light Wave Virtual sketch with OCD and ControlP5…

1. “…control over the Perspective Changes & Linear Movements… could be useful to set up some oscillators to do this job…“
2. ”…[develop a] persistent HUD display showing a Monomatic ‘Live’ console with all the real-time input from our performance instruments and controllers displayed graphically etc…“
3. ”… Combinations [could be useful] – which could actually be an XY pad – as per the ‘ControlP5diyController.pde’ example…“
4. ”…make these a set of generic controls too – so their their outputs are switchable between cameras – perhaps by radio button?“

and I’ve generally had success – or stopped trying – with each of the above

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Having come across iClarified, iHackintosh and Redmond Pie while researching jailbreaking my iPhone 3GS I’ve now had a catch-up (only just added their RSS feeds to my Google Reader account) to see what’s new…

From iclarified.com

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I set out to jailbreak my iPhone with a list of possible gains…

I can’t say it’s been a wholly pain-free experience… I managed to ‘brick’ my iPhone several times and was forced to ‘restore’ loosing some data I hadn’t backed up – but hey – what did I expect? A few weeks on, I’ve regained a bit of device stability,  gotten used to the new functionality and interaction and I’m happy I did it. Here’s how I’ve gotten on…

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I’d been having some issues mixing the PeasyCam and Obsessive Camera Display (OCD) libraries in the same Processing sketch – which I’ve now sort of resolved and learned a thing or two in the process…

I found that switching between a PeasyCam and non-configured OCD viewport camera feed made PeasyCam behave idiosyncratically – loss of mouse control, some offsetting of Z-axis distance (only on the first switch back from an OCD feed – it’s consistent from then on), clipping of the scene – as if the farClip setting in OCD has likwise adjusted it in PeasyCam – though clipping isn’t actually assignable within PeasyCam itself.

Turns out PeasyCam is now at v0.8.1 – I was running an older version – and the documentation now includes a number of methods I hadn’t noticed before.

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I’ve come across this really interesting 3D scanning technique before – but I’ve now spent a bit more time following the various links and exploring it in more detail…

I’m keen to try it for myself and wonder if a ‘micro’ projector such as the Optoma Pico PK 101 DLP and IPEVO Point 2 View USB webcam and/or ‘tricked out’ PS3 Eye Webcam could be a compact and affordable solution – and possibly for live performance too?

There’s a good overview of the technique in the May 2008 post Turn a webcam and projector into a 3D scanner which also provides some Processing applets and code examples and lists useful references and links.

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I have video documentation from PEAL that I’m planning to edit in FCP… but it’s in .mts format and from a couple of different HD AVCHD camera sources…

After a bit of head-scratching and online research I got to a reasonably straightforward and speedy solution… and in the process managed to clarify a few significant terms for myself such as:
Mbit/s V MBps
Apple ProRes 422
Similarities and Differences Between 1080i and 1080p

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Since the Apple software update to Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 1 I’ve been having problems running some of my Processing sketches – particularly those using MIDI – and Java applets such as SevenUpLive 1.4.

I’ve also been experiencing some memory access errors e.g. “Invalid memory access of location 0×0 eip=0×917108d0” with monoControl and some of my own sketches – which I think are issues with OS X, Java and RAM?

A googled forums.sun.com post and referenced Processing forum post seems to indicate I’m not alone.

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It’s been a while since I’ve spent a bit of time browsing and catching up with developments at the monome.org community site – though I’m always interested to see what’s been going on – and typically a few things caught my eye:

MonoControl – “an adaptable and flexible midi control application written in Processing for Ableton Live (or any other DAW) which, if configured correctly, should report all controller changes to MonoControl which then adjusts the LEDs on the monome. The app uses the buttons of the far rhs column of the monome to navigate through 8 different pages – and in each you can create combinations of faders, crossfader, x-y faders, push, toggle and note buttons and button matrixes – all stored in an an xml file.” (my somewhat edited version of the app description)…

This is exactly what I’ve been hoping to develop myself using Nick Rothwell’s shado…so I started to implement it into my Mirror2 real-time video processing Processing sketch and it’s working well…

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