Everywhere you go you will see old bumper stickers from previous presidential campaigns. I like how stubborn folks will leave the losing candidate’s bumper sticker on their car or truck so they can always point to it later and say… “SEEE! I told you that guy you elected was no good!”

Image Source: http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2009/03/14/an-election-procrastination-bumper-sticker/

(The site I got the image from wrote about procrastination and removing bumper stickers.)

John Edwards is hilarious. He’s going to jail.

This quick demonstration shows how I can control the settings and parameters of plugins in Ableton Live with a Kinect. The basic idea is that I am using “Synapse for Kinect” to generate left and right hand positions relative to my body, normalizing the positions from Synapse to the midi controller range (0 to 127), generating a MIDI continuous controller (CC) command, and mapping the MIDI CC command to knobs and parameters in Ableton Live. In this example, I map my left hand Z-position to the Dry/Wet knob on a Ping-Pong delay plugin. Thus, when I put my hand closest to the sensor (in front of me) the delay shows maximum effect and when I put my hand behind my body (away from the sensor), the delay is almost non-existent. I also mapped my right hand Y-position to the Rate knob on a flanger plugin. When my right hand moves away from my body (and perpendicular to the Kinect sensor) this increases the flanger Rate. When my hand is close to my body, the flanger rate is zero. Playing with these effects while playing guitar was a very satisfying experience and it gives me a reason to actually move around when I’m playing guitar. Also, its really interesting how the Kinect skeleton detection sees the head of the guitar as my hand, you can see this if you pay close attention in the video.


Synapse for Kinect:
http://synapsekinect.tumblr.com/post/6307790318/synapse-for-kinect

I put together a quick demo today of using the Kinect sensor with Max / MSP 5. Thanks to the great software by Ryan Challinor (Synapse) I was able to get the Kinect sensor working with Max / MSP within an hour without ever having worked with the Kinect sensor before.

After retrieving the left and right hand position data from the Synapse software in Max / MSP, I have the left and right hand y-positions drive the frequencies of two separate oscillators. Then I just add them together and send them to the audio card. While simple, the effect is pretty interesting. I plan on using this for a number of my Crushed Ice’s live performances to control various synth parameters.

Here is a screen shot of the basic Max / MSP patch…

Synapse software:
http://synapsekinect.tumblr.com/post/6307790318/synapse-for-kinect

Old Design

I’ve also been trying to find an excuse to learn Solid Works for creating 3D models. Thus, I decided to create a Solid Works model of my new pedal board design, shown below.

Pedal Board Front-Side

… and the back side… showing the triangular supports…

Pedal Board Back

The two large red blocks represent the Ernie Ball volume pedal and the Cry Baby Wah-Wah pedal. The smaller blue blocks represent traditional Boss and MXR pedals. I’ll be cutting the boards for the triangles and the long boards later this week!  I’ll probably end up staining the boards to bring out the knots in the wood.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=An+implementation+of+ROS+on+the+Yellowfin+autonomous+underwater+vehicle+%28AUV%29+&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C11&as_ylo=&as_vis=0

I presented the paper at the IEEE / MTS Oceans 2011 conference in Kona, Hawaii. Designing underwater robots has its perks!

1,016 Miles by Kevin DeMarco

Avnet / Xilinx Microboard with Motor Control Circuit

I’m getting pretty far along on the wearable system I am building for my Real-Time and Embedded Systems class. I now have the Xilinx Microboard driving two DC motors to give the user feedback on suggested paths. I embedded a Microblaze 32-bit processor in the Xilinx FPGA which uses the lwip Ethernet stack to communicate with the Gumstix Overo Air COM over a telnet-like interface. Given the appropriate command, the FPGA sends an enable signal to the OpAmp / MOSFET circuit to drive the DC motors. Hopefully, I have all this integrated in a couple weeks when this is due. I will put up a full project page that will go over the problems and tribulations I’ve encountered with the Gumstix and Xilinx / Avnet Microboard at the end of the Fall 2011 semester.

Microboard with External Circuitry