Sebastian Pirch

sound reactive video mapping on styrofoam cubes in different arrangements.

Here is a video of it playing super mario tunes indicating climb or sink rate in the testing elevator.

As my wife Polina and me are starting our crosscountry paragliding career, i made this little gadget to add a barometer to Polinas Samsung S3 Mini that lacks one. 

Its composed of an Arduino nano clone, a Bosch BMP 180 barometer, a HC-05 Bluetooth module and a small piezzo beeeper. It doesn’t have its own battery as it is intended to be used with an Android phone and a solar power bank, so it gets its juice over usb.

With help from the XCSoar forum people I managed to implement the NMEA Protocol and make it work with XCSOAR Android app.

Im also thinking of adding an optional GPS reciever and maybe SD card to make it work with the Kobo eBook. There is still some space left! 

The circuitboard comes out of my DIY CNC Machine with all the holes already drilled, ready for assembling.

There are 2 compareable products on the market already; blueVario and SkyDrop. However, if you are into Arduino programming and you want to tweak the audio or add airspeed or whatever sensors you could start from here. The Arduino has many pins free and the circuit board is soldering friendly.

CNC Files and Arduino Project are here

If you want to buy one, or only the pcb, pls send me an email.

I needed fast infrared blob tracking for TIME IS THE SOUL OF THINGS

so i reproduced a hack from this awesome guy:

http://www.bajdi.com/fun-sensor-the-wiicamera/ 

The Wii Camera module is a so called motion flow sensor. Its made of a small 64x64 pixel lcd array and designed specially for the task of keeping track on small infrared dots. It’s doing the processing onboard and outperforms every camera based system in means of latency and sample rate by far.

It can keep track of up to 4 blobs, gives X and Y position (0-1024) and size for each over SPI to an arduino, and from there over serial in my 3D software with a few milliseconds latency at 100 hz.

Display, mouse and keyboard always appeared to me as a bulky solution to interact with virtual worlds. 

I did many projects experimenting with alternative input devices such as Kinect, openCV camera tracking, multitouch screens, elektronic sensors, VR glasses, haptic feedback  and what not, searching for more immersion.

Scavaging old inkjet printers i made this 3 axis cnc router.

It uses servos instead of steppers and quadrature encoders for positioning - much like an industrial system.

To synchronize axis motions i developed a scaleable system with one microcontroller per motor/encoder pair communicating via SPI. This makes it a powerful system as a startpoint for all my future robotic projects.

An Android + Arduino based UAV platform. A smartphone is connected via bluetooth module to an Arduino board and a barometer module.

This setup enables my Multiplex EasyGlider to fly by itself, (and hopefully soon when weather is better) follow me flying my paraglider.

A smartphone provides most necessary components already - all nicely interfaced, calibrated and ready to go. 

GPS coordinates to follow waypoints, IMU values for stabilisation against turbulence, aswell as Internet connectivity for communication and data logging.

It can record images for later 3d reconstruction of the terrain.

The only things missing are an accurate barometer, connection between Android and the microchip that actually controls the servos, plus a signal gate to switch between microcontroller and manual control.

This is realized with this circuitboard:

It can fly according to flightplan which is created using Google Earth.

.KML GPS Tracks are recorded and stored to SD. They can be visualized in Google Earth later, overlaying Sensordata to tune the planes behaviour.

Images from the smartphones camera are used for photogrammetric 3D reconstruction

A high-res textured 3D model is the result

A set of patches that turns Pd’s rudymentary OpenGL output capabilities into a quite powerful framework for realtime 3D graphics. It can be used for fast prototyping of User Interfaces, small games or sound reactive video installations within the node based Pd environment.

You can download it in the RESOURCES section.

GemEngine adds a virtual Camera to the Gem OpenGL implementation thereby gives the user the ability to  navigate in 3D space like in other 3D packages.

The OpenGL window can be spanned over many outputs and GFX cards.

Multiple inputs for machine user interaction are ready to use.

MIDI devices, sensors with Arduino boards, Live Camera Tracking with openCV, Wacom tablets, ARToolkit coordinates, RT SoundAnalysis, KINECT sensors, OSC can be implemented with little programming skills.

Here is some stuff i made with GemEngine:

ZODIAC Synthesizer

S2C Agent based Crowd Simulation