Just a quick announcement that Capillary Action has finally returned from our ridiculous 4-month US-UK-Europe-US tour (except for 5 more east coast dates in another week and a half).

It was long and amazing and draining and eye-opening, and now I’m glad to be home.

My next project is to stop starting new projects and work on documenting the work I’ve already done, so check in soon for updated/better info!

So I’ve been playing around with WMII for a while now, soaking in the glory of tiling window managers. One thing that’s a bit inconvienient is easy automounting. I don’t want to have to manually create a directory in /media and mount each and every teeny-tiny usb drive I might plug into my system.

Turns out that recently the Ubuntu/Gnome folks have decided that Nautilus will be handling the automounting of drives and such instead of the gnome-volume-manager. This is all well and good if you’re using nautilus, but for console-junkies it’s not so helpful.

The gnome-volume-manager package in the repo is compiled with the “–disable-automount” configure option, so to enable it we have to recompile:

First make sure you have all the required libraries to build:

sudo aptitude build-dep gnome-volume-manager

Then download the source:

apt-get source gnome-volume-manager

configure:

cd gnome-volume-manager-2.24.0
./configure --enable-automount --disable-dependency-tracking

build and install:

make
sudo make install

Then just add to your startup script and you should be up and running.

Don’t forget to use gnome-volume-properties to configure the volume manager to actually automount.

After installing openembedded from these directions, I’ve successfully compiled the helloworld-image target and have it running on my beagleboard! After running bitbake helloworld-image and bitbake virtual/kernel and finding something else to do for a few hours while everything compiled, I had a usable rootfs and kernel image. I already had my SD card partitioned, so I just erased the old Ångstrom image and copied the new stuff over.

To install the image to the SD card (Where BUILDDIR is the directory form which you ran bitbake, MMC_BOOT is the boot partition on your MMC card, and MMC_ROOT is the root partition:

1. Go to BUILDDIR/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/beagleboard
2. cp MLO-beagleboard /media/MMC_BOOT/MLO
3. cp u-boot-beagleboard.bin /media/MMC_BOOT/u-boot.bin
4. cp uImage-beagleboard.bin /media/MMC_BOOT/uImage
5. cd /media/MMC_ROOT
6. sudo tar -xvf BUILDDIR/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/beagleboard/helloworld-image-beagleboard.tar

Boot time is about 8 seconds from when it starts to unpack the kernel to executing userspace code.

Well, today I got Günter Geiger’s PDa version of Pure Data compiled on the Beagle Board. I haven’t gotten HDMI output to work properly to my TV so I’m relying on X-forwarding for the GUI, which is pretty painfully slow at the moment, but I did get some sound out. Here are the steps I took:

1. Install libtk-dev and libtcl-dev packages using opkg. I had to use the -force-depends option because opkg complained about some missing dependencies. Hope it doesn’t come back to bite me later.
2. Install the compiler packages gcc and gcc-symlinks
3. Download the source code from here.
4. Unpack the source into a directory of your choosing
5. Edit the makefile in the src subdirectory and change libtk8.4.a to libtk8.4.so and libtcl8.4.a to libtcl8.4.so
6. type “make”

You should now have a pd executable in the bin subdirectory.

I have just received a beagleboard, flyswatter JTAG, 4GB SD card, USB ethernet adapter, and USB hub. Everything I should need to get started with embedded development.

I created the proper filesystem setup on the SD card as per these instructions, and installed koen’s demo image for the Ångstrom embedded linux distribution.

After hooking up the Flyswatter to the serial connector through the Flyswatter/Beagleboard adapter I got a boot prompt. My TV is complaining that it doesn’t recognize the input format, so I’m probably going to have to figure out a custom modeline in the xorg.conf, but I can live with a command prompt for now.

For those unfamiliar, the Beagle Board is a platform for embedded development based on Texas Instruments’ OMAP3530 System-on-chip board. Basically it’s a computer three inches square. It has handy input and output connectors for easy experimentation. Stay tuned for updates.

As of 4:00pm today my old Columbia site has been decommissioned and redirected to this one. The site is dead, long live the site.

Stay tuned for more frequent posting, now that I’m getting a couple projects off the ground and I’m pretty much done futzing around with the site layout/architecture.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted any info here. Since a recent re-wire of the sensorBib to switch all solid-core wiring with stranded(a mistake I will not make again), I’ve been working on putting music together to perform on my new sensor-augmented upright bass. My premier performance in Columbia University’s Dodge Hall was a smashing success. I was also able to do an in-class demonstration for George Lewis’s course “Jazz in the Global Imagination” that included a short group improvisation alongside George, with Mario Diaz de Leon and Steve Lehman. A video of the event will be posted soon to Columbia’s new jazz website, Jazz Studies Online.

On Thursday March 27th I’ll be performing alongside New York jazz drumming psychopath Kevin Shea, with a possible third member as yet undetermined. We’ll be performing as part of the Columbia Computer Music Center’s “CMC Fün Nite,” a monthly concert series to perform new electronic music. If you’re in New York City you should come on up to Prentis Hall at 632 W. 125th St.

I finished the hardware portion of my sensor array right before I left for a tour and recording session with Capillary Action, but didn’t get a chance to post pictures, so here they are, only a month late. In the coming weeks I’ll be working on refining the PD patches that do the actual audio processing, as well as doing some composition. Keep an eye out for new videos and mp3s.

I successfully printed out my pattern onto a bunch of 8.5×11 sheets of paper, taped them together and cut them out. I taped the patterns onto my bass to make sure that it all fits the way my model said it should, and so far so good. This also let me figure out exactly where I wanted to put the electrodes, MouseTrap boxes, and the Arduino on the bass itself, in places where the copper would be easily accessible, but the sensor boxes wouldn’t be in my way. I also tried to keep the boxes on the sides of the bass, to minimize their effect on the bass’s resonance. Now it’s off to a fabric store and then to track down a sewing machine.

I’ve been playing around in Blender and QCad to figure out how I want to mount the sensors onto my bass, and I’ve come up with a design for a cloth covering that will house the sensors in pockets on the bass. Much thanks to Chromo for reminding me of those bass bibs that some players use. This will allow me to remove the sensor apparatus if I want to play acoustically, and also to non-permanently mount the sensors onto a different bass if I’m traveling. I put together a sewing pattern, so as soon as I get to a fabric store and select a cloth, I should be able to sew this up without too much trouble.