FOSCON III was a blast last night. There were lots of talks about subjects as diverse as generating midi and controlling Lego Mindstorms robots with Ruby. Plus, there was the most pizza I’ve ever seen in one place! Thanks a lot to Thomas Lockney and all the organizers for putting it on.
Here are the slides from my presentation: RAD: Physical Computing with Ruby. I’m planning on supplementing them with some video of the demos as well as a few additional slides to fill in the holes that appear without the audio. Also, I’m working on getting video of the talk from the Box Populi folks who were shooting last night and I’ll post that as soon as I’ve got it.
Tagged: ruby, arduino, foscon, physical computing, portland, oregon, holocene
videos at
http://mpegwiab.demo.hosting.boxpopuli.com/archive.html?pname=fosscon.rss
Hey Greg, thanks for a rad FOSCON presentation. I feel there is no reason I shouldn’t buy an arduino to play with now that I know I can use ruby to bitch it around! I’d love to try and doing some physical computing using RAD to mess with audio & interaction. Have you done anything in that direction?
Michael —
We did some experimenting with using the Arduino to play a melody through a speaker. Due to Ed’s genius, we were able to get pretty far. Here’s the code we had going:
http://www.computerkraft.com/wiki/index.php?title=Music_demo
As I mentioned on that wiki page, I can’t remember if there need to be some resistance in the circuit with the speaker or if it can just naively sit between the output pin and the ground.
If/when we reconvene the arduino experimentation group this would be a fun area to mess around in. Plus, it would be fun to wrap up some of the overhead here into some C helper functions, or even some RAD library code to make this easier. The code for handling meter and pitch control is pretty much boilerplate so you could abstract it away pretty good with the right helpers…