I’ve moved! Both physically and virtually, really. After a really long time at the university campus I’ve moved to a little flat in Enschede. New surroundings, new roommates, lots of exciting, new stuff 🙂
And, as you can see, my little blog has been moved to www.grandmaster.nu
This means that the site is no longer locally hosted by my own workstation and I’m free to turn it off every once in a while 😉
Feel free to contact me with suggestions and such, as I’m probably forgetting lots of stuff.
On another note, I’ve been busy with a couple of things – I went to the STRP festival and saw the ISAM show, really amazing stuff. I also went ahead and did a ‘Leadership’ course, some interesting stuff was going on there as well. I’m not entirely sure it will pan out to anything concrete, but at least I had a good time there. And now I can put ‘Certified Leader’ on my resume 😉
I’m toying with the idea of building a boombox based around a Raspberry Pi, a couple of guys I know are willing to help and it seems like a great way to get to know the hardware. It’s been a while since I’ve done any soldering though… we’ll see how it goes.
Until next time! Stay sexy!
I do realize I’ve not been really updating my site lately, and that’s about to change! There are a lot of changes going on in my life and this site is definitely on the list of stuff that needs to change.
On another note I’ve switched to Linux on my old laptop, hoping that its sucky performance was purely a windows issue… it’s not purely a windows issue. So now I’ve ordered a shiny new SSD hard disk, which should both make it more robust, and a lot quicker. I just hope that I won’t need a lot of disk space 😛
Later this month I’m going to the STRP festival. I had a great time last year, and this time around there are performances of Amon Tobin and Aphex Twin. I don’t know many of the artists in the exposition, but Theo Jansens’ Strandbeest looks like a winner 🙂
Looking forward to the end of the year, when the Raspberry Pi should become available. The specs are impressive, very much so for the price; for that price it could become the basis for a lot of Arduino-like maker projects. And it seems easier to program for/with.
We’ll have to see what the future brings.
Last week I’ve been working as a volunteer at the Grenswerk Festival of the Arts (sorry, Dutch only). It’s been a wonderful festival, I’ve had a great time and even ended up in the newspaper a couple of times because of it. As an added bonus I got to hang out with Louke again, which always makes me happy 🙂
If you haven’t tried it before, try helping out at a local festival – meet interesting people, have loads of fun!
I’ve dubbed the project with the DDR dance mats the Rumbler Project, and I actually mostly fixed the sound playback issue I was having last week. There is still a lot more work to be done with the audio module, but it works and is fairly simple in usage.
I did find that, while the concept is kind of fun in a “ooh that’s neat” kind of way, it’s too hard to actually use the mats to produce some kind of music. So this week I’m going to introduce a basic rhythm system – pushing a button starts a sound and a timer, and pushing it a second time will play the sound again and indicate the end-of-loop time. Here, the sound starts to loop with the timing that the user has provided himself, freeing his feet up for more stuff.
Doing this should make it easier to make music, although the users’ control becomes less immediate. We’ll see how it works out in the end. If all goes well I may add a lot more sounds and start improving the layout-to-sound mappings to ‘feel more natural’.
Last week I had an idea for a small project – party entertainment. The trend towards computer party games is long gone, but there are still many unexplored ideas. I’ve been thinking about using another concept that used to be a hype – floor sensors, most notably used in Dance Dance Revolution.
The thing I’m trying to accomplish is to use the floor as a kind of instrument – more specifically a sample playback device. This idea is not new by any means, but I just thought it would be a good exercise, and a nice usage of my engine. Also, if it works properly it should be pretty fun and something that would be a special enhancement for parties and such.
So I got my old DDR dance mats and looked into how the buttons could be read. Turns out they are being modeled as gamepads with 10 buttons. So I needed joystick support, which turned out to be pretty straightforward to implement.
I also needed some way to load and play back audio samples, which meant audio support. I went for OpenAL with the libsndfile library, which took a bit longer to get working. It turned out kind of okay, although the sound playback is slightly too slow – right now there is a noticeable delay between pressing a button on the dance mat and the actual playback.
Even so, given some good audio samples the setup is pretty fun to toy around with. I’m probably going to refine it a bit more over the next couple of weeks and try it out at a small in-house party I’m having. As soon as it’s at least semi-working, I’ll put it up here for grabs.
It’s pretty exciting to have something that’s even remotely fun working… I’m probably going to do many more of these as I continue to develop my engine.