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This is flowering tree footage I shot early in the spring of 2010 in Seattle. I edited it to go along with Foscil’s track Coming To You Live.

This is a crazy controller that I have put together for the purpose of controlling visuals software, and probably sequencers and synthesizer software as well. It’s a hack together of a bunch of different controllers as a way to test out what works.

Here is a track I put together using just Apple’s Logic and my Minime.

After the jump is more information and photos.

I have tended to perform my visuals using the screen on my laptop to choose video clips, and then doing most of the rest using just a 16 dial controller. I’ve been looking a long time at a lot of different types, sizes, and shapes of controllers and just decided one day to put together a bunch of stuff I already have to see what I could come up with. The case ended up being larger than it would have to be, so if I remade this, I’d measure everything out to make it as small as it could be while also feeling good.

Contents:
1x Monome 40h kit (64 LEDs and 64 buttons, you can add a tilt sensor)
1x Evolution UC-16 MIDI dial controller (without the settings buttons)
1x Intec XBox controller joystick and controller board
2x BBC Microcomputer joysticks wired into aforementioned XBox controller
1x cheesy purple case from the thrift store
1x USB hub
1x USB A port, external
1x USB B port, external

Some of the component parts could just be partially disassembled and then attached to the case. The USB hub, and the UC-16 controller, that’s all I had to do. The rest was more work.

The XBox controller really is a USB device with a strange connector. To use it on the Mac, all you have to do is cut off the original connector, and then wire up a USB connector instead. With the Mac, you also need drivers. I’m currently using Carvware GamePad Companion for most programs, but I think with Max/MSP I can support it without the driver.

The most important modification you can do with a game controller is to take apart the joysticks and take their springs out. Once you do this, they will stay where you leave them. This allows you to use that stick as an X and a Y setting that won’t jump back to the middle. Very useful for audio filters, color filters, and the intensity of various audio and video effect plugins. I lucked out and found a couple joysticks that came from an old BBC Microcomputer (yes, that BBC).

I was thinking that once I figured out what worked, I would transfer things over to a new case. But, I just realized that would be somewhat insane, as I would have to de-solder and re-solder all of the almost 400 solder points on the minime section. So, if I like things, I will make a nicer version, and likely sell this one off as-is.

Here’s a previous post on putting together the electronics kit for the monome in this project: http://v8media.com/2007/10/12/minime/

p.s. – I know the correct pronunciation of Monome is supposed to rhyme with gnome, but I still like calling the little monome section of my controller the Minime, pronounced “mini me”. That or Getome, which should be pronounced “Ghetto Me”

View this video on Vimeo

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In the midst of the open spaces of the desert was a pile of materials put out for the purpose of art. People would wander by, tinkering with all of the interesting pieces. Some would think up a combination that was greater than the sum of the parts and create a piece of art. After the event was over, Phyxx gave me a tour of the results.

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Testing out a new camera, the Canon T2i, as well as trying out the Velvia picture style. I’ll likely have to tone down the settings, some of the color looks fairly comic bookish.

The camera has automatic gain control, so if you shoot a quiet scene, you’re going to get hiss from the overly amplified background noise. The audio from the internal mic sounds quite decent for these bands though.

I’d recommend watching this footage on Vimeo in HD. Depending on your connection, you might click play, and then hit pause right after in order to let the full file download before playing. Makes for less jitters.

Fuzzy moss on rock

Pink flower petals on moss

Mossy stone lantern

Orange koi vs clown koi

Mushrooms and moss

Tiny buds

(click on any image to see a larger version, click here to see the whole set of photos on flickr)

My Bel Air still has an old oil bath air cleaner. I’d never seen such a thing, and my previous 1956 Chevy had a standard flat air cleaner.

The concept is that you get the air moving very quickly towards a standing pool of oil. When the air turns to go around the corners in the filter, the particles of dust in the air shoot into the oil and get stuck. This one is fairly simple, just one bath, and one path for the air to flow through.

All I had to do to switch it out was to pull the whole air cleaner off, drain out the oil, and then wash the whole thing thoroughly. There are paper air filters that you can just drop in. This one I got from Danchuk (part # ), but I’ve heard that there is a standard tractor air cleaner that fits. I’ll have to track those down for when I need to change out the filter.

The one reason to switch away from the oil bath to a paper filter is that your engine will burn a little bit more cleanly (as it’s not sucking in small amounts of oil to be burned in a not useful place). Probably for the same reason, a paper filter is supposed to help fuel economy slightly.

On the other side of things, if you race in dusty areas, it sounds like oil bath air filters work better at trapping large amounts of sand and dust. So I’ll keep that part around in case, um, I happen to enter the Pikes Peak rally. Or this cool little Spring Thaw!.

I hadn’t been taking good photos of the car, so that’s what this post is about. I’ll actually take photos of the air cleaner and the engine compartment soon. I haven’t been able to drive the car for a while as it has a knocking sound on the lower end. It needs to be rebuilt. I’ve gotten estimates for the rebuild, and it’s going to make the most sense to have the shop do everything to the engine. The shop that is going to do the rebuild doesn’t deal with cars, so I’m going to have a shop that is closer to me quote how much it would cost for them to take the engine out and put it back in once it’s rebuilt. If it’s going to cost much, I might just do that with some friends.

Anyone in Seattle feel like helping pull and install an engine?

I did visuals for a couple acts this past weekend for Seattle’s 2009 Decibel Festival. There were some great artists playing, though I was a bit of a non-goer. I was working on my visuals software right up until the Nosaj Thing show. Ended up going back to a software setup from about three years ago and took about five hours changing some things around to make my software a bit more friendly. As usual, I was editing the software during the shows as well. Thankfully, I didn’t cause any weird errors or crashes while doing this. That is definitely the danger.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of messing around with Max/MSP/Jitter and have most everything figured out. There are a couple main things (and I’m sure some small ones I’ll run into) that have been stopping me from using Max/MSP for my gigs. Main one is that the way I end up using my current/previous visuals software, Troikatronix Isadora is that I set up a MIDI dial controller for all of my main mixing, levels, hues, saturation, contrast, and set up a couple (or sometimes three) bin pickers, where I can look through my various folders of video. The way Jitter is mostly used is with drop down text lists. I don’t even know what most of my clips are named, since I just choose them visually.

All the methods in which I’ve tried to programmatically fill in icons and make them clickable have thus far failed. Because I really wanted to use Max/MSP this time, I started manually creating these things. I got about a third of the way through and Max/MSP crashed upon loading my file. I also tend to use some forms of feedback, by looping video back into parts of the software that I’ve already gone by, or by looping sections with specific filters. I’ve had a hard time getting this going in Max/MSP as I did a bunch of work to get the effects to be processed on the video card. The recursion I want to do looks like it might almost have to be outside of the video card, which might mean that the video card setup might not work. You can tell I’m still working on it. Hopefully by next time I’ll have some pretty crazy things happening.

(Photos by Russ, kochs.org, and Donte. Thanks to Luara for pointing me towards the Mary Anne Hobbs photo!)