Evil Mad Scientist Labs just launched version 2 of their “Peggy” LED driver board.
This can drive up to 625 LEDs and is now arduino-compatible, so you can program it like an arduino board. It’s available as a kit but the design is open source, so you can download the PCB design and make your own or modify it. The code’s also GPL. Great work!
The video shows a demo of conway’s life, but I imagine that admirers of Tenori-on and Monome might be looking to Peggy for some hacking inspiration.
See also: Octinct, a full-colour monome-lookalike project.
I’m blown away by soundamus. This is what web 2.0 should be all about.
Like all great ideas it’s easy to explain. You give it your last.fm username and then it analyses your stats to see who you listen to. Then it generates a custom RSS feed for you to subscribe to, which will tell you about new releases by the artists you listen to, and for each soundamus-announced release you look at you also get a list of releases by similar artists.
It doesn’t sound particularly astounding on paper, but within a day it recommended to me a couple of albums that I was very excited about but had no idea they were forthcoming. Plus I was really impressed with the simplicity of the experience from there… It’s no exaggeration to say that within 4 or 5 clicks I was on the label’s website, pre-ordering the new CD. Excellent!
I think the most impressive thing about soundamus is that it’s so light-weight that it’s hardly even there — you don’t install any software, you don’t even have to get sent emails to drive you to a site (like plaxo and friends), it just occupies a quiet little slot in your RSS Reader, or whatever you want to do with it. (And since it’s RSS you could do quite a lot with it.) It does one thing, and it does it really really well.
I have some reservations about who’s been invited to the party…. for example my pals in Orkestra del Sol have a new album out this month on their own label, and they have distribution so you can buy it from the likes of HMV and Virgin (erm, Zavvi), but I’ve no idea how they’re supposed to interface with the wider system that soundamus is tapping into.
(erm, looking into it more it seems that they’re mashing up last.fm data with amazon data, but I definitely ordered that last CD from the label directly, interesting…)
Still, this is exactly the sort of thing that “native to a web of data” should be about. And it’s only possible because last.fm has an API and the data is open, which means that anyone can build on this to innovate and create new services.
Splendid.
Last year I blogged Dan McPharlin and his fantastic miniature cardboard models of fictional analogue synths.
I only just spotted it, but back in January Wire To The Ear posted a short interview with the man himself.
