CuriousInventor.com Logo

We're making a new product called VMeter that's a USB MIDI Controller Touch Strip and Display. It's going to be sold through a new site: VMeter.net. In addition to a music controller, it has the potential to be used as a general purpose input touch strip and output meter display. It uses a USB HID interface (like a mouse or keyboard), making it relatively easy to interface with. We'll be publishing both the protocol and computer-side source shortly. You could even use it with an arduino if you get a USB host shield. There are 8 capacitive touch sensors on the inside, and all the raw values are sent out, making it possible to do pressure sensing and even some limited multi-touch sensing.

 

Read More

 

Here's a quick demo of our new FM Radio Shield, featuring its ability to read the RDS text data off the radio stream and display it in the Arduino Serial Monitor. 

The FM Shield also:

• digitally control station, volume
• read station strength to find good stations, or empty bands
• head phone amplifier, uses headphone wire as antenna

The FM Radio Shield is available for purchase.

Read More

On Saturday April 24th Travis Thatcher will be conducting a workshop on simple DIY electronics for music and the construction of a Voice of Saturn Synth. See more info after the jump.

Read More

A Frac Rack version of our Filter kit is now available: Voice of Saturn Voltage Controlled Filter

The VoS Voltage Controlled Filter is based around a CEM3372 filter IC (4-pole resonant low-pass filter)--the same chips found in the filters of such analog classics as the Sequential Circuits Prophet 600, Prophet T8 and Oberheim Xpander.  It features two inputs that are summed and then fed into the low-pass filter. The input and output volumes, cutoff frequency and resonance can all be controlled by VC (voltage control) or knobs.

Read More

Have to admit the song makes some good points... :) Read More

TracyEvansProductions, a company that specializes in interactive tradeshow exhibits and other multimedia, has integrated Stribes into a kiosk that interactively explains the interaction of water and oil in wells for Schlumberger. Read More

Ready-to-play out of the box Stribe Duo and Quad assembled units are now available from the stribe kit page. Read More

On request, we created a custom Stribe Duo with a joystick and two pots mounted on the side. If you're interested in similar mods, let us know. We can add things like MIDI ports, VC (voltage control) inputs, etc. Read More

MachineCollective.org installed some blue LEDs in a Stribe1, and is also making a custom casing. Check out other pics and videos at his flickr photo stream of the Stribe1 build. He's another monome / arduinome case maker, and his cases are gorgeous. Read More

The Guthman New Musical Instrument Competition was this weekend, and brought in some very inventive new music-making devices from around the world. Here's a small sample (more pics to come): SoriSu (video) (Hyeki Min): a Sudoku game that algorithmically generates music based on your play, using the same rules as Sudoku. Wrong plays generate harsh dissonance as punishment. Hammond Organ from Engine (jan perschy, austria): Old Hammond organs generated sound not from electronic oscillators, but tonewheels--actual spinning wheels with magnets sensed by pickups. Rich timbres were made by mixing these tones together ("additive synthesis"). Jan has replicated this idea but uses various rotating parts in an engine for tone wheels. The pickups are actually Harley Davidson pickups used to detect piston position in actual motorcycles. The keys gate the pickups on/off. Motors on Fly-Wheels Sensed by Guitar Pickups (Neil Feather): Some of the best music (in the author's opinion) came from one of the simplest instruments. Three fly wheels, each with a couple electric motors mounted on them. Neighboring guitar pickups hear different tones depending on how fast the the wheels are spinning, and lots of interesting phasing / beating effects were generated that slowly changed as the wheels slowed down. The inspiration apparently came from swinging vibrators near guitars... Silent Drum (Jaime Olilver): The 2D profile made by pressing and stretching a drum skin is used to control a phase vocoder. This was the winner of the competition. This instrument had a great connection between what you heard and what you saw. Read More

Review of this month's Atlanta Dorkbot meeting featuring Don Hassler's Buchla 200e demo, and Aaron Ruscetta's old school Amiga hardware presentation. "... Buchla, along with Robert Moog are credited for being the fathers of the synthesizer, both sort of simultaneously developing synthesizers on either coast. Buchla was involved with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded by the composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender. The tape music center was a place for new music performances, experimentation, and several psychedelic parties which, at the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene, included bands that went on to huge success like the Grateful Dead.... " " Read More