Sampolin

Dave Macdonald has a fun project, partially in reference to Laurie Anderson's tape violin, but his is all digital and fun, using Arduino, Pure Data, and a cheapo violin (I love that blogger considers "cheapo" a correctly spelled word).

It's mostly done, and he and I have worked together and learned a lot about everything through building this thing. Pretty great. Expect a longer post later with more details.

Flex

Recording Services and the IT department are both talking about having video broadcasting be a thing that they do, so I'm interested in pushing for this even more.

Flex can do this:
http://www.swfflex.com/blog/1/2008/11/Flash-Video-Chat.cfm

I'm going to check this out too.

Webcast!

Project:

Broadcast live video and audio from the MSU Composition Department Premieres Concert on Tuesday, October 20th, hopefully with titles and fades and a physical interface.

Things we need:

Software mixing of two video sources, fading in and out
Processing things to learn:

• alpha mixing of two video sources, black screen
• multiple outputs, so you can monitor everything and send a separate feed out
  
• dynamic text stuff (typing, displaying)
• MIDI input from knobs on MIDI controller to do fading, crossfading
• outputting video to something Justin Tv or Ustream can take
  (manycam?)

Alternatively, doing it in Pd with Gem, I feel would look less nice, but the list of things to learn may be shorter.

• multiple video sources
• nice looking transitions
• nice looking text, in strict 2D

*shrug * more?

Processing... oh yeah...

This post is mostly for the button project. So, this software Processing can record audio, do stuff with mp3s (I know it can open them and stream ones from online, hopefully write them too) and generate code / communicate with other software/scripts for posting, and it's best at communicating with Arduinos serially, as they use almost the same language for programming and communicating and whatever. It can also look sweet for the web-side stuff. And, it's free (not like Flash) so we wouldn't have to buy it. Should we go this way, here are more things to learn:

• how to do file creation/manipulation for the mp3 files and rss feed creation stuff
• communicating to something like Flex or Ruby on Rails to update the podcast info and update files on the server
• and, I suppose, learning to do all the audio recording stuff in Processing, but that shouldn't be too bad
• maybe how to make a sweet web-side front-end for the whole project. It may load way too slowly, but we'll see

eh? this could consolidate the Audacity-Scripting process we had talked about earlier, if it's possible to save mp3 files out of Processing.

I also want to try making a website that is flashy and fun, either with Processing or Flex using Degrafa. More on that later.

Computerless button???

So, I've been reading some things on the web today about Arduino and ethernet. Here's what I got:

• Nate mentioned that arduino doesn't have enough memory to adequately deal with audio. Well, maybe your srub board does, but the new Arduino Duemilanove (that's 2009 for those of you that don't habla italiano) has TWICE the memory of the Diecimila. But as Billy Mays said, "And that's not all!" The reason it has twice the memory is that it uses a new Atmel chip, the ATMega328 (as opposed to the ol' 168). Like the 168, the 238 by itself is really cheap ($5ish or less), and you can just pop it in to your board in place of the 168! Brilliant! I don't know if even doubling the memory would fix the problem, but experimenting would be cheap.
• Then I read about this sweet project from the folks at NYC Resistor. It's a server library called Webduino. The guy who did the write up on Google Code clearly knows more about servers and the interwebs than me, so I won't butcher the jargon. Read about it yourself, here. Also, he's got a slideshow explaining it that I can very nearly understand!

At this point, I must defer to my much MUCH more informed colleagues. Would these two things in combination allow for the button to function independent of a PC? Doing so would allow us more freedom in button placement, as we wouldn't need to worry so much about putting a computer somewhere. However, it would make the buttons themselves more expensive and more costly to replace if damaged or stolen. Thoughts?

One more quick thing

Just a quick project. D-Touch. Does anyone know where to get Euro-sized paper in East Lansing?

posting ben's response - thanks!

Here's the link to server related info that I use when setting one up. One caveat, it's much larger and more documented than the last time I built a SAMBA/FTP box. C'est la vie...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Servers

At the least, we'll need to create a server with the ability to ftp to a site (or potentially host the site), run an app to record and syndicate (probabrly in ruby), communicate with apple/windows machine through a SAMBA install (backup purposes), with suitable firewall and remote access permissions (IPTables).

Also, if we decide to go with ruby on rails or drupal, it might be a good idea to go with turnkey linux (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/) for sheer ease of setup/use.
-Ben