On the transition from New Years Eve to New Years Day I made a recording of the sounds in my neighborhood, similar to the one I made last year.

Here's a link to the archive.org page for it in case you want to download it or read more:
http://www.archive.org/details/NewYears2010WoodstockPortlandOr.

It has reminded me just how much I enjoy the sound of binaural recording. I'm still tickled by the spacial placement of sounds in a 3D field. If you listen, you should ideally wear headphones and keep the volume very high (I didn't alter the signal and left a bunch of headroom).

So my pal Mykle has done this EPIC event called LIGHTBAR to cheer people out of their seasonal affective disorder during February in Oregon. If you can't see the victory in building a GIANT and BRIGHT bamboo-event-party-dome, by hand, in the middle of winter, then you need to be poked (with sharp bamboo).

A few of us from dorkbot PDX have been peripherally involved, even contributing some works.

My friend Brian and I collaborated on a light-based project dubbed the RETINAL TATTOO GUN. The concept involved a series of bright flashes intended to [temporarily] imprint iconic imagery directly into the retina with strong after-images (ghosts).

We had a semi-working prototype up at LIGHTBAR last weekend before it collapsed(!!!) this week. This iteration of the retinal tattoo gun was a pretty big technical failure, but it was a fun project and we have a nice foundation going forward.

The circuit I designed/built had a series of issues, the worst of which was some form of ground bounce or inductive jibber jabber that caused all 8 flash channels to fire when any of them fired. Turns out that yeah, it's nontrivial to sequence a bunch of disposable camera flashes.

The day of installation we also found out that the repurposed viewmaster switch was connected in a way that caused the flashes to trigger when the advancer jobby was directly in front of the slide...so most of the light power was dampened. Whoops, doh!

We hope you enjoy the above image, and we hope to have something dangerous, compelling, and electrical to mount to your face in the near future.

So this past Sunday was the first "official" (more formal) DorkbotPDX event in Portland. I've been meeting with the group semi-frequently and really enjoyed seeing the first major event come alive.

I gave a brief talk on the p5 glove controller as used as a sound controller with free/open source software...especially pure-data. I have slides and demo patches from the talk available here

I had a real blast! Things went pretty smoothly for being a first-time event...and we're well positioned now to learn from our experiences and move forward toward great success. The momentum factor is a big thing IMO, especially during mid summer when people are on vacation or are generally more active...travelling, enjoying the outdoors. That's a big yearly theme in the NW -- sun comes out, people go out. We tend to get really busy during the summer.

I'm slowly and surely working on building an audiopint, but I had to RMA the PSU, and so progress has been delayed. (crossing fingers hoping the problem is actually the psu). David has been super helpful in explaining some of their process and what the caveats/pitfalls are. I still don't have a great method of mounting things to the inside of the case/lid without poking through from the outside...but I'll likely resort to JB weld or a plastic weld to hold in brackets/bolts so things can remain secure. More updates on that project as it progresses...