The JayOscillator is the stupid name that I came up with for my HTML 5 synthesizer that I’ve been working on over the last month or so. I spent a good part of today making it look pretty, though now It works in Chrome and Safari right now. It technically works in FireFox, but the displays for the variables don’t seem to want to open their eyes. Take a look:
The JayOscillator
I named it the “JayOscillator” after the Korg KAOSCILLATOR, as my thing is a similar sort of notion, written in JavaScript.
You can try it out here for now, though no promises that the URL won’t change in the future.
Unfortunately, I think I have to give up on iPad support. Apple nerfed the ability to auto-start HTML 5 audio tags from JavaScript. Without that ability, their is no way I can keep a continuous tone going.
I’m considering rewriting this as a native app, though. Most of the effort here has been in figuring out the math necessary to get this going. Since that work is done, porting to different languages and platforms is more of a chore in API calls.
This Saturday we’ll be having an open house at 2 PM, then onward from there we’ll be watching an episode of Game of Thrones, and playing Dungeons and Dragons as part of our new Geek Out event. Unfortunately for now, the game is limited to the first 4 participants, but if there’s enough interest we’ll be expanding soon enough.
Feel free to bring snacks and stop by for the fun!
See... rendering is fun!! I downloaded a partially completed batmobile model from Blendswap.com (thanks Xuan!), but it wasn't ready for primetime yet. So I segmented, textured, and lit everything (including the Tron style wheels), before rendering it with Cycles. Everything was done in Blender 2.61 FTW. Blender continues to be my favorite open-source 3D modeling and rendering software package. It has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of years, moving from a fledgling modeling project to a blockbuster production quality modeling, animation, lighting, rendering, and post-processing toolkit.
It’s snowballing into a truly stunning software package. So, there’s no better time than now to teach you how to use it!
In about two weeks I’ll be offering an Intro Blender interface, rendering, compositing, and video motion tracking class right here at Hive76. I’m looking at a 2-day class January 28th-29th, probably 4 hours each day. The beauty is you don’t need to have any 3D modeling skills… there are a TON of LEGALLY FREE and INSANELY DETAILED 3D models widely available. Pick your favorite model and I’ll help you work with it over 2-days to get you positioning, rendering, texturing, and lighting. Hopefully on day 2 we’ll have enough time to try some basic animations inserted over video recorded from meatspace.
Any questions, come to our weekly Wednesday night open house and see what we’re talking about.
Ok, you probably can’t make the baby grand in this picture, and even the metronome is likely to be a serious DIY challenge — but you can definitely make a pretty accurate DIY scale, and you can do it cheaply and easily.
I needed an accurate scale for a science project and knocked this baby together (based on this design) using found parts. I was able to easily measure to centi-gram precision and with a little care, a scale like this could be tuned to measure to milligram precision.
Precision (the ability to discriminate between differences in mass) is largely a matter of careful construction — accuracy (the ability to weigh to an agreed upon standard) is another matter altogether, and it basically hinges on having an accurate reference. Fortunately, a great institution, born of Philly — the U.S. Mint — was wise enough to make Nickels and Pennies in rather convenient dimensions. It turns out that nickels are 5.000 grams and pennies are 2.500 grams — so you not only have sub-milligram accurate references of convenient size — you also have an easy way to cross-check your scale by using nickels to weigh pennies and vice-versa.
Details of DIY Scale
The zoomed in photo shows most of the essential elements of construction. Basically, I used a threaded 10-24 rod for the balance (10-32 would have been a better choice). I used a wall-board razor as my knife-edge pivot point. Two angle-brackets served as a hard, flat surface for the knife edge. A nickel with a hole in it and some thread served as a reference weight (I wound up with a whole array of perforated nickels and pennies). A wall-board T-square served to measure the distance from the pivot to the reference weight. I used an index card and a small mirror to make a sliding mirror in order to read the position of the weight w/o parallax error. The whole shootin’-match was held on a stand that was salvaged from a cheap drill-press. Measurements were performed by reading the distance between the movable weight and the pivot point, and entering that value in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
I definitely could have purchased a milligram scale for far less than this cost me in terms of spare time, but I learned a lot about scales in the process. Almost all of it was stuff that I knew “in principle” — but actually building the scale infused my arm-chair knowledge with real-world experience, yielding an alloy whose properties seem to have exceeded its constituent parts.
The scale was nowhere near large enough to measure my satisfaction, but I estimate that this exercise yielded just about one metric ton of fun.
Come to Hive76 on January 21st 10AM – 4PM for a build hackathon focusing on this installation! Some of the things we’ll be focusing on include touch-sensitive light chimes inspired by these, a computer vision-based theremin using Sean’s html5 synth, and altering the brightness of lights based on radio frequency interference. We’ll be splitting up in to teams to work on these problems and have some working prototypes by the end of the day. Stay for an hour or six!
