Cigar Box Guitar
This I made for my Uncle. He’s an excellent guitar player and I thought he’d like the challenge of something a little more rough. The cbg (cigar box guitar) came as a kit from mojocbg. It’s simple enough to get all the parts individually, but I was in a time crunch and didn’t want to chase everything down. The neck comes w/ a few of the major cuts made and the frets are marked. So all fret lines have to be cut and the neck sanded down. I put in the fret wire and used a dremel to grind down the excess and a file to further smooth that. I also stained the neck a bit and put on 3 coats of a hand rubbed polyurethane. I found the threaded rod they supplied for the bridge to be excessively large, so I replaced it w/ a bit of 1/4-20 all thread and milled a few hundreds of an inch off the bottom to match it w/ the 1/4-20 they supplied for the nut. Also, instead of gluing across the whole soundboard, I milled out the neck to relieve the soundboard and provide a spot for an acoustic pickup.
Between the overnight gluings, waiting for stain and poly to dry and all other misc work put in, it was about a 4 day (or rather night) build. It sounds pretty good, but pretty much requires a slide to play. I did end up cutting the top of a vodka bottle for an authentic bottleneck slide for him as well…
Sockmonkey
Not much here, but as per tradition I made a sock monkey for my niece’s first birthday, my 4th sock monkey overall, but I have to admit to help on this one from the wife. I was running a little behind w/ 2 projects going on at once….
Maya + Wii Nunchuck + Arduino + Processing…..
After watching the behind the scenes features to the latest Star Trek, I was struck by a couple of things. First, how JJ Abrams created that heightened sense of energy by constantly drumming on the camera during takes. Second, how the guy at ILM (sorry didn’t catch the name) had an accelerometer on his desk to add in that drumming to cg shots.
Now, I don’t know how much that little device was used or the level of it’s role in the film, but I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea. I had been toying with using Processing to issue commands to Maya a while back and thought I should resurrect some of that now. I’ve got some history using an Arduino and a while back I picked up a little $4 connector to hook a Wii Nunchuk to it thinking it may be useful somehow in the future. I put two and two together and got this little app built in a couple days of free time.
The Arduino app is pretty barebones, it needed to fit on the original Arduino w/ less than 8k of memory. All it does is stream out the state of all the sensors on the wiichuck at it’s full baud rate. That data is captured by the Processing app and it’s all plotted and visualized as follows:
Once I had that running it was a matter of creating a Maya commandPort and connecting to that in Processing to feed the proper MEL commands to handle realtime rotation/translation of an object such as a camera. Hitting the Tab key will start playback in maya and generate keyframes as you’re doing your thing. The Processing app handles everything once you open that port in Maya.
Now, I’m not the most clever person around so I may be missing something but since Maya on OS X does not have a mocap server built in (unlike the other platforms) this seems to be the only way to do that. Perhaps there is a way to write a Python plugin to do this natively inside Maya, but then you don’t get the cool graphs that really make it look like you’re doing something fancy….
It isn’t straight up plug and play, you have to get your Arduino set up, load the app, make sure your serial port is correct in the Processing app and make sure it’s talking to Maya correctly. However, once that’s done you can open up a lot of doors with how you use it. Right now I create a locator and use it’s motion to augment camera animation… but the joystick could be wired to blendshape sliders or whatever you want. It’s the nunchuck though so you’re limited to roll and pitch. And it’s not the best accelerometer in the world so there’s a lot of noise. Specifically it’s not bad for adding in that little bit of organic tilt and handheld look to an established shot..
I make no guarantees, nor do I really offer any kind of support for this. Technically it SHOULD work on every platform, but I only have access to OS X so that’s what I know, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work on windows and linux… I can’t pretend to know how to fix anything, but in any case I would probably try to help you out if you need it and seem like a nice person… Here is everything you’ll need to get started:
1: Arduino with USB: $29 – I get mine from sparkfun!
2: WiiChuck adaptor: $4 – Bunch of places to get it listed on this page. (hook it up just like the picture shows…)
3: Wii Nunchuck: you can get those many places…
4: Arduino IDE: Free!
5: Processing: Free!
6: Maya: Not cheap!
Here are my apps:
Processing App -> wiiChuckToMaya_v03.zip
Arduino Sketch -> wiiChuck_v03.zip
In addition you’ll need to get and install this for the Arduino -> Tim Hirzel’s WiiChuck.h library
That should about do it, I think. It seems like a lot of setup but it’s not that big of a deal. Big thanks to Todbot and Tim Hirzel for doing most of the groundwork on using the Wii Nunchuck.
Let me know if you use it for anything handy, I’d love to hear from you… otherwise, enjoy!
Catching up
I’ve fallen behind already… I need to post here about a chair that I repaired, a set of drawers I fixed, our gardening attempts as well as other things. I’ll get around to it soon enough…
ponoko hubble
my first dive into using ponoko was to create a hubble telescope necklace pendant for my wife. the ponoko service was really nice to deal with with a great site and great people. overall a great experience – my only beef was that the shipping cost as much as the materials and laser cutting since it was coming from new zealand. But it was still pretty inexpensive.
now what.
blog relaunch – hopefully I’ll phase in a new look, but mostly my intent is to be more proactive w/ presenting my projects. look for projects around the house, insignificant projects I find interesting, arduino projects, processing.org projects, 3d projects and generally anything else I may find myself interested in…
New 6-bulb Lamp
I made a 6 bulb lamp a few weeks ago, it still has some finishing touches that need to be done, but it’s been a nice thing to have around. The fixtures hang at the end of cords at varying lengths. The cords collect at the top and are wired into one long plugged cord. Currently I have it plugged into a footswitch which has been working out very well. I chose to put compact flourescent bulbs in for a couple reasons.. The consume far less power than standard incandescents and they don’t produce nearly as much heat. Since I knew the bulbs woud be resting against other fixtures and cords, it is good that they don’t get too hot. Each bulb consumes 15watts of power for 90watts of light from CFLs.. in other words, it’s really quite bright. Though the light from it is very soft due to the overall length of the lamp. So far I like it alot. Here’s a photo:
I’d show the whole thing but then I’d have to show the wall that it’s hanging near and that’s not in the best of shape right now, so this’ll have to do 
one rgb pixel…
So I soldered up the LEDs on some protoboard for something a little more permanent and to get them off of the breadboard to make room for other things.
Here’s the soldering job – a little messy, yes, but it works. there are 2 red LEDS, 2 green and 3 blues. The blues are not as bright as the red and green and 3 seems to be a nice balance.
This is how it looks from the top. They’re all aiming at one spot above them…
They’re aiming at the bottom of this 35mm film can. That way the colors mix properly and I don’t get an errant blast of color off of one side. There’s a bit of seperation still, but that’s pretty much eliminated w/ yet another diffuser.
By putting this over the film can I can get a really nicely mixed and diffused color that is still very bright. Also, instead of having a bright spot of light at the top of the diffuser, the glow seems to eminate from deep within..
next I need to come up w/ a halfway decent base and some code fixes… till next time…
Arduino Mood Lamp
I’ve seen a few mood lamp postings around so I decided to build my own. In it’s current incarnation it does a slow hue cycle when powered on and waits for serial data in the mean time. When it recieves serial data it alters it’s color based on that data. This way I can scrape the net somehow and pass info to the lamp and change it’s color based on some external information source. Color changes are dissolved from one to the next. I can also send a switch to it so it re-activates the hue cycle. Hardware is based on Arduino and the host application that sends data and scrapes the web is currently based on Processing.
Most color cycle examples do not actually accomplish a full spectrum of color. while fading one color down they’re fading the next up – to achieve full spectrum, you need to maintain one channel at 100% while one fades up and only fade down once another channel is at 100%… anyway…
Here is a shot of the light currently (click for movie of the color cycle):
there are still kinks to work out and some features to add, but it’s looking good so far…
Clock Update
New parts are in! I’ve got some small PIC microcontrollers to handle hardware PWM for the lights while allowing serial input to define the brightness values. I don’t know how to do that yet, but the theory is there.. HA. Also I’ve got in some all important male and female headers so I can build up parts and connect them securely together. Maybe this weekend or next week I can work on the power supply for the light controller and the 2 wire LCD interface that needs to happen. Good Times!