contract works
Bodyscapes_corpoPhonolux
May 7th
“Bodyscapes_corpoPhonolux” is a multidimensional interactive installation connecting synaesthetically the visual and spatial sense with hearing. The basic idea of this project is the translation of light into sound – to transform what we see simutaneously in an acoustic soundscape. The performer becomes “sensor” and interactive element at the same time. Along the dancer‘s body are 8 lightsensors installed, measuring steadily the various intensities and colours of light on selected points along the body surface (joints, head, etc…). Download the Bodyscapes folder (PDF-File)
Hörverbindung zur Quelle
Aug 19th
The project “Hörverbindung zur Quelle” is an art project by Katarina Hinterlechner. It consists of a modified phone booth which allows users to listen to the gurgling noise of the different fountains that make up Vienna’s water supply.
This project was part of the centenary celebration for Vienna’s water main supply. More Details can be found on this website (in German).
Planning, organization and mechanical construction by Katarina Hinterlechner and Christian Deschka,
Hardware and software engineering by Simon Laburda
Here are some pictures of the construction process (I’ll upload more pics of the finished project soon):
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- Wiring “diagram” to map the phone keys to the Nanonote keyboard
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- Testing the Eco-friendly powersupply
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- Wires everywhere …
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- … don’t forget to label them
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- All the electronics, not yet assembled
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- Final assembly of the electronics
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- Testing ….
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- Assembly of the phone booth
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- Everything’s in place
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- Now we just need to put up the instructions …
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- Done.
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- :)
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- @ Urban-Loritz-Platz, Vienna
Maybach prototype LED-Matrix
Jun 7th
We were contracted by Areus Engineering to develop a control system for a passive LED matrix of up to 768 white LEDs (48×16 pixels). The LED-matrix was attached to a scale model of the prototype for a Maybach car. The idea of Michal Plata was to make the car sort of invisible by recording video from one side with a webcam and projecting it to the other side. (If you’ve seen the James Bond movie “Die Another Day”, you’ll know what I mean ;) ). “sort of invisible” because of course with blocky 48×16 pixels and no colors you could never do an accurate representation….
The LED control-system should be able to receive pixeldata from an attached PC and do 16 shades of gray. With this configuration our system managed to display 15fps with a refresh rate of up to 100Hz. The pixeldata came from a webcam attached to a Linux Netbook. On this computer the image was scaled an dedistorted using OpenCV and transferred to the LED-screen using ledbridge.
The controller had to drive the 15mA rated LEDs at 240mA to achieve the full brightness while scanning through the 16 rows, yet never stop scanning the matrix because that would burn out the LEDs instantly! Achieving the high frame- and refresh-rate with the ATMega32 was a difficult task, I had to think of an optimized framebuffer layout to decode the incoming pixeldata to in order to achieve the high refresh rate. Also I had to use assembler because with C the required performance just can’t be reached.
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- Developing and testing the prototype
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- The finished LED-controller.
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- The model car
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- Soldering & Testing the matrix at Areus Engineering
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- Wiring it up
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- Just some random pattern
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- Putting on an acrylic cover
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- All LEDs lit up
Lighthead Project
Apr 30th
The Lighthead Projekt consists of a number of semitransparent helmets. A single helmet contains a 433 MHz Receiver, a microcontroller and very bright leds.
We controlled it by using processing running on a small linux machine directly hooked into the audiomixer.
Developed for Katarina Hinterlechner and Christian Deschka
The MHE-Cube
Jul 8th
The cube MHE-Cube was my first LED art project. It was a gift from a number of employees at Statistics Austria to new founded company MHE & Partner. The cube form was chosen because that company was working with “OLAP Cubes” which is a form of representing data in a three-dimensional table (sort of…).
The cube itself was built by Helmut Stenitzer und Eva Fischer. The electronics inside by me (Simon).