May 2008

Working with the Sharp GP2D12 (B-beam) controllers

May 29, 2008

I’ve been asked to write an article for Make magazine on MIDI controllers using lasers and light. It’s come at the right time, as I’ve been meaning to try out the Sharp GP2D12 sensors I bought from Trossen Robotics. Anyone that has played a Roland synthesizer with a D-Beam controller will recognise these immediately. They [...]

Read the full article →

The Trouble with Windows…

May 22, 2008

The trouble with Windows… For many years I’ve been a happy (albeit slightly frustrated) Windows user. I felt safe in the knowledge that whatever problems came my way I had the skills necessary to pop the hood on XP and tweak a few settings to get through the day. Not any more. I recently bought [...]

Read the full article →

Liquid Sky

May 20, 2008

…and it wouldn’t be a laser show without the liquid sky effect.

Read the full article →

MakeTV footage

May 20, 2008

Last night we went shooting some footage for MakeTV and moved the harp to Anton Phibes’ secret underground lair..* This was the first time we’d had harp set up in a proper venue, and it looked pretty amazing. We also took along the my homemade display scanner for a bit more p’zazz. *Google:The Abominable Doctor [...]

Read the full article →

How the TARDIS really works…

May 17, 2008

On the show it looks effortless, but in real life it can take a little longer to make the TARDIS appear…

Read the full article →

Happy LASER day…

May 16, 2008

Today is the birthday of the LASER beam – it’s 48. From Wikipedia: The first working laser was demonstrated on May 16, 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories.[2] Since then, lasers have become a multi-billion dollar industry. The most widespread use of lasers is in optical storage devices such as compact disc and [...]

Read the full article →

Pixart sensor continued…

May 16, 2008

New for 2011 – check out the MIDI Camera – gesture control with no Bluetooth, or even a PC! I made some progress today – it looks like the majority of the components used in the PixArt hookup here: http://www.kako.com/neta/2007-001/2007-001.html Are for creating a clean 25Mhz clock signal from a bare crystal. If I buy [...]

Read the full article →

Getting inside the WiiMote, I2C, PixArt and all that good stuff…

May 12, 2008

Some of you will have noticed that I was able to modify a WiiMote to do visible light tracking recently. My goal was to produce a gesture tracking system for the laser harp. This was OK, but having to use Bluetooth, and Windows was a PITA – I needed a hardware only solution that could [...]

Read the full article →

Using a blog responsibly…

May 12, 2008

It’s funny, but when I first heard about “blogging” I couldn’t really grasp what all the fuss was about. The notion that you should post entries on the web that really should be kept in your private diary seemed rather strange. I think that there is a major flaw in the whole blogging concept, (for [...]

Read the full article →

More pictures from the Maker Faire

May 12, 2008

Skip Russell emailed me to send me this link to his pictures from the Maker Faire – great job, as the lasers are not easy to capture on camera… http://www.flickr.com/photos/skipr/tags/laserharp/ Looking at the EXIF data, it was 18mm, at 1/5s F3.5 – not sure about the ISO, but I should imagine it was set fairly [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries