jimihertz - 25 June 2008 06:57 PM
Hacker Space Festival Report
About The festival
The first edition of the Hacker Festival is over .
It took place in a huge warehouse in Vitry/Seine ( 1Omn from Paris )
2 main rooms, one for the conference, one for the workshop, a few little rooms for installations ,
and a big open space outdoor for chillin out, playin’ loud music or frying sausages…
We met great people working on astonishing projects such as :
RFID hacking,open source creation tools (DYNE),own built usb fm transmitters,
measurement of cellphone power, sound installation that track sounds on the web
and turns you violent,biometric sensors for dance projects,9khz ringtone to (un)blocked supermarket caddies wheels,and of course cracking codes…
About the workshop
The main goal for this afternoon workshop was to introduce people to the multitouch
with a clear forehead statement: “ making a multitouch screen is at your hand “ .
The workshop was attended by 15-20 people, most of them had heard about MT,
some already knew about the basic howto or had quit after the very first attempt of buildding one.
As planned we’ve been presenting briefly the “history” of multitouch, the various hardwares and techniques, the NUIgroup and Touchlib.
Then we built together a miniMT, people put their finger on it and enjoyed their very first multitouch experience,
playing with demos such as the smoke app or the photoapp.
I would love to have more than one miniMT working at the same time but unfortunately, i didn’t bring extra cameras
(i brought one but without the driver, useless!!) and none of the participant did ...
a few hours later with few “wantmore” participants , we built a MiniMinorityReport Screen, a kind of easy and fast replica
(i will detail the simple howto of this entertaining version in a further thread(on sunday,i promiss) .
End of the first day
The second day
Building an FTIR setup
( The weekend before the festival, in order to bring a table to the festival ,
i decided to build a new setup, easy to transport and to install quickly everywhere,
mine was made in a huge box and impossible to move without a truck .
So I sketched one and i looked around to get second hand materials : iron bars !!! ,
A friend lend me some tools and i spent the weekend cutting,soldering and assembling the new stand for the screen.)
On the very same morning of the second day of the festival,i received my impatiently expected leds from Digikeys,
i bought some TSAL 6200 ( telefunken, 1ooMA, 940nm ).
So i brought to the festival my previous screen, which was very unstable due to low inner enlightment.
(ref of leds : 940nm,20mA)
i took off all the 70 leds started soldering and wiring the brand new ones all day long .
Then it was easy to mount the new setup .
At night, the screen was fully working, the calibration only took a few minutes.
Maya,A little hacker’s daughter was the first to release the magic of the smoke app.
(thanks for her sparking astonished eyes _and her shy loud laugh !)
Then people tried the few apps we are working on with Pd,
the first one is kinetic images mixing ang scratching.
the second one is a video puzzle,
and the third one is Polychroma,a musical app on which Raphael has been working hard .
and the bonus video scratch
we will post those apps soon on the pd section !
We ve been discussing with the people while they were using the screen , answering there question and observing their behavior .
Very Late at night we dismanteled the setup and went home with the pleasure of the job done, the gratification of unanimous thanks, and a lot of energy to keep building screens, creating multitouch contents,learning , and solving a lot of lacks and problems.
About Polychroma
Polychroma presents 3 stages, a rythmical one , an instrumental and an fx one .
On the center of the screen,a sequencer is represented by 2 circles , and a bright blob is rolling around representing the tempo,and triggering the objects by collision .
On the left side , their is 4 circles :
- 3 little colored ones, when touching at them you make appear sound objects
that you can place at will in the rounded timeline .
-1 white circles : when dragging the objects into it ,you make them disappear.
On the right side , there is a colored circle , allowing you to navigate from page to page .
The first page allows the users to trigger rythmical sounds (kick,hh,snares)
The second -------------------------------- musical tones ( bass and synth )
the third ----------------------------------fx sound and samples and to put the tempo up or down .
All the sounds are based on synthesis and generated in real time .no sample at all .
Conclusion
I really don’t know how many participants went there ,
But everyone surely went for learning and sharing experience on how to hack your daily space .
To all of them and to all of you : Thanks !
keep up the collaborative work , keep building your own tools !
Very inspiring.
