Monday, March 22, 2010

Electronically Modified Didgeridoo controls realtime video processes


This is the first step in a new project of mine involving real-time video processing using the audio from my Electronically Modified Didgeridoo. This is a test of some basic dynamic control from which much more complex control will follow as the project continues. Audio from the didgeridoo is filtered into bands in Max/MSP which is then used to control different parameters via a micro controller. Two video signals are being manipulated by means of dirty mixing and PWM through an analog switching chip. If anyone has some advice of just a good idea in regards to this project, please let me hear.

Pictures: I am using an ATMega168 chip in my Evil Mad Scientist board that I use for prototyping. On the breadboard is the analog switching chip which produces some really interesting effects when used to distort a video signal using PWM. The white box to the side is a Canopus analog to digital video converter that I had to add a fan to because it kept overheating and glitching out. The source of the visuals are coming from two DVD's; one is a blown out image of a lightbulb, and the other is just plain white.





2 comments:

  1. That's awesome work. Funny about that Analog to DV converter, I had bought one of those at my last job and I thought it was the greatest purpose built consumer device I'd seen in a while, it worked great and we never had any issues with it. It's nice to be able to plug in video and convert it to fairly universal DV in realtime. That is a pretty novel idea to switch the inputs very quickly via PWM, would have never though they would latch that quickly. Maybe there would be a way to delay and genlock the feeds, but then again maybe you want the rolling glitch effect. :) Anyways, nice work. Now you could add another camera input which points at the screen to provide feedback? The loop acts as a nice choke-point in which to tweak saturation, inversion, brightness, etc. Bonus if you can delay it. (I used to use shoutcast video streaming buffers or windows media encoder on old PCs for adjustable video delay loops) These days, I think processing may be better suited. Cheers! http://electrosthetics.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ electrosthetics
    Thanks, thats a good Idea to add in some feedback, I will definitely try it out.

    ReplyDelete