Miriam, a Professor of Media Arts & Technology, started using Arduino in 2008 to bring new possibilities to her interactive exhibits.
The post Maker Spotlight: Miriam Langer appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
You don't actually need to grunt to get a good tennis swing, so why not let you're tennis racket do all the grunting for you.
The post This Tennis Racket Grunts Like Maria Sharapova When You Swing It appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Getting started using Bluetooth LE is much harder than it should be, and that a lot of great work people are doing is getting dropped on the floor, or worse yet done again. We decided to sit down and do something about that.
There's something oddly romantic about taking a piece of archaic technology and giving it new life as a work of 21st century art. Take the Royal Empress typewriter you see above. This particular model was built in 1961 and eventually landed in the hands of Amanda Gelb as graduation gift. She and her fellow classmates, Jinyi Fu and Quingyuan Chen, looked at the hunk of aging metal and saw potential instead of an obsolete writing tool. For their installation at the ITP Winter Show, they wired up each of the keys to an Arduino for tracking what a user types, then paired that with a tiny projector that displays the letters on a sheet of paper wrapped around the platen.
The "face" part of the equation comes from the webcam mounted to the top of the typewriter case. It uses brightness to map a silhouette of the person sitting in front of it and fills only the darkened areas with letters, creating an ASCII portrait in real time. The code also automatically loops the letters you type, so even if you press only a single key the picture will appear. Of course, you could also type out a love letter or a quick blog post and the whole thing will be wrapped inside the confines of your outline. When you're done, you can press the re-labeled print key and a laser printer spits out your portrait.
While there are already plenty of apps and sites out there that will automatically create ASCII versions of images, there's something alluring about sitting in front of gorgeous piece of hardware and creating it live. Plus, there are few things in this world as satisfying as pressing down the stiff keys of an old typewriter, hearing the titular onomatopoeia and seeing the letter appear before you. Especially when you know you're creating a work of art, even if you're a terrible writer.%Gallery-slideshow157402%
Gal Sasson is running this puppet theater project using little more than an Arduino and some control software on a computer. The puppets, theater, and control box are all handmade.
The students at ITP are constantly churning out creative projects that are unafraid to walk the fine line between art and tech. So its no wonder that Gal Sasson's Make a Play wound up as one of the semi-finalists in our Insert Coin: New Challengers competition. It doesn't hurt that the concept also combines two of our greatest loves here at Engadget: toys and Arduino. The name, it turns out, is actually quite descriptive. The microcontroller-driven stage allows anyone to quickly create a piece of miniature theater using handcrafted puppets and an impressive selection of buttons, knobs and switches -- all lovingly handcrafted out of wood on this prototype. The control panel can move the actors using two motorized carts, cue lighting, playback voice recordings and even activate special electronics embedded in the puppets, such as LED eyes in the demo video after the break. Any action can be recorded and fed to a companion computer program, where tweaks can can be made to the automation. Honestly, sounds like the sort of thing we wish we had a as kids.
Check out the full list of Insert Coin: New Challengers semifinalists here -- and don't forget to pick a winner!
Filed under: Misc
Arboration controls a projected landscape based on the musical input of the user.
First year ITP student Xuedi ("Zoodie") Chen presented this awesome physical/virtual game installation as part of ITP's Winter Show.
Lasers, Arudinos, cats doing funny things -- here's a student project custom built for the internet age. We popped by the Winter Show at NYU's ITP school to check out a new batch of works exploring the intersection between art and technology and couldn't help but be enamored by Cat Car, the "feline fitness frenzy." Designed to be a sort of exercise contraption for our furry friends, Sam Brenner's project eventually blossomed into something for more entertaining, though he assures us that "the safety and wellbeing of the cats involved [were his] top priorit[ies]." Cat Car uses a steering wheel controller with an attached Arduino and gyroscope / accelerometer, which communicate with a cat harness via an XBee. The movements control a servo on the back of the cat, which moves around a laser pointer, propelling the cat forward, thus allowing the user to remotely control the cat. A video of this magic can be found after the break.
Continue reading Cat Car turns your feline into a furry RC vehicle
Filed under: Misc
Source: Sam Brenner
The Physical Equalizer is built upon a set of homemade flex sensors. When blocks are stacked on top of them, the volume of different instruments in the loop changes.