Something Unreal

Now there are 4 motors singing together! Perhaps this is an early Christmas video…? It was originally just going to be a test, but I decided to upload a proper video of it. Still, the sound recording is experimental. I want to find a way that doesn’t hear a thump when a DC motor starts and stops spinning.

The music was used in the Christmas special of the anime Love Hina, and is originally sung by Yui Horie and Yukari Tamura (“Yamato Nadeshiko”).

[Watch in HD]

My laptop runs a program of mine that plays a MIDI file, and sends info about certain notes to an Arduino. The Arduino then shows info on an LCD, switches the 2 stepper motors via 8 MOSFETs, and passes on info for the 2 DC motors to a separate motor speed controller (Sabertooth 2X5), which controls those 2 motors. I think these DC motors are much more suited to the higher notes of a singing voice than the stepper motors are. Likewise, the steppers are certainly better for bass notes. Together, they make a team. =D

The stepper motors and DC motors are running from separate power supplies – 12V for steppers, 15V for DC motors – as I haven’t found a reliable way to compensate for the drop in voltage that the stepper motors cause when they run (this causes the DC motors to slow down a little).

More info is in the video! =)

This is QBot. He likes to eat mahou shoujo.

Nomming Kaname Madoka with third-person and first-person (“Madocam”?) views. I still don’t understand exactly how, but one of its legs managed to turn off my camcorder while recording the first-person view.

[Watch in HD]

Illustration originally by Matsusaka Gyuu (Danbooru re-upload is here)

Originally recorded on 2011年05月16日, before I had faced the fact that I’d have to use Microsoft Paint to make a proper ending/credit screen while editing videos on my laptop (my computer’s out-of-order) – that’s why I didn’t make one, and also why there is no real editing in this video.

They’re back! This time, I made the MIDI from scratch myself, specifically for the motors, and used a lot of pitch-bends and subtle vibratos.

[Watch in HD]

Also, if the motors try to jump to a high speed too suddenly, the Arduino now ramps up the speed gradually (although it’s fast to human ears). That means no more nasty grinding sounds like the ones in my previous video, which you should watch for more info on the singing stepper motors and this “stepper bass box”…

Believe it or not, that plasma ball-like program of mine normally runs nice and smoothly, but my MIDI player eats a painful amount of my netbook’s CPU (yes, my computer is still out of action – I’m dual-viewing with that monitor). I’m not sure if I’ll release Biribiri, since it’s only my railgun *is shot*

Since I can’t run a proper video-editing program on my netbook, that credit screen was made on Paint. And that concludes today’s random facts.

This was the 10th cosplay act at Animecon 2011 in Almelo, the Netherlands, on May 7th (Saturday). It ended up being the winning act in the competition.

No microphones were used for this act, so I tried to make the speech easier to hear in editing, but there’s still a lot of background noise (I was at the back of the hall >_<).

[Watch in HD]

Apologies for the sucky sound quality – it seems these stepper motors aren’t ideal for music, since they’re so quiet. -_-

[Watch in HD]

A program of mine running on my laptop is sending the frequenciesof notes from a MIDI file to an Arduino, which in turn controls 2 stepper motors and shows the frequencies on an LCD. The music is the opening theme to the anime “Kannagi”, 「motto☆派手にね」.

I suppose this is a step up from the “singing motor” videos I uploaded in 2007/2008. With stepper motors, the pitch can be precisely correct! However, the ones I have can’t get very high-pitched, so they’re better for bass (not what they’re doing in this video). At around 00:16, you can hear what happens if one tries to go faster than it can – it just vibrates.

Maybe I’ll try to get some stepper motors which are louder / higher torque / have more steps per revolution, when I have the money to spend on such random things…

An attempt at playing a simfile properly, using these very strange-looking gloves which I modified into a StepMania controller (using the I-PAC board). I’m still getting used to using them, especially the fact that I don’t need to use as much effort as I do to press keys on my keyboard (I keep hitting the arrows for the first half of the simfile or so early for this reason, gradually compensating). I’m not quite sure how I managed AA, with all those missed notes at the start…

[Watch in HD]

There are bare wires on the fingers of the gloves that touch the tin-foil on the thumbs. The wires are attached to the board, which then simulates keypresses and releases on a standard PS/2 keyboard port. Only the 2 fingers closest to the thumbs on each hand are used, because they’re the fingers I use when I’m playing with 2 hands on a keyboard. This way, I don’t need to completely re-learn to play.

The connections can still be extremely unreliable (it took many attempts to even get a run as good as this). Also, I use this board rather than my Arduino because I got the I-PAC a long time before I ever got the Arduino, and since this board is actually made for the job, it’s easier to use, and probably works better too (there’s a limited number of interrupts on an Arduino).

I did make another video, showing things in slightly more detail, and doing the very first gameplay test, but I didn’t edit it because it was just for a few friends. You can still view it here, but I kept the video as “unlisted”, because it’s messy as hell, and insanely amateur-ish (not implying that most of my videos are “professional”, though). It’s also low-quality – I recorded it in SD rather than HD, because it’s quicker to compress, and, as I said, it was just originally to show a few people.

A new soundcase will be making its way to London MCM Expo in May 2010! Here you can see the making of it, and the old one being used in October 2009. It seemed to go down so well that I just had to do it again, and not a last-minute job, this time. ;)

[Watch in HD]

The soundcase is basically music on wheels. Except that this time, you can also sing karaoke on it, and there are lights (although you probably won’t be able to see them much during the day, unfortunately… wish I’d made it last October, when it gets dark early :/ ).

Also, yes, I haven’t put any pictures on the suitcase yet (in this video), but I couldn’t really leave it until much closer to MCM before uploading the video.

We were walking away with some hardstyle blasting from a “sound suitcase” we’d made and used throughout the day, when a group of people started showing off some cool stunts to it.

[Watch in HD]

This was at just gone 6 PM, after the first day of London MCM Expo, on Saturday the 25th of October 2009, just outside the ExCel building.

The music is part of Shingo DJ‘s set from Otaku Hardcore Revolution 2.

This was the announcing of the winners of the AMV competition on 20th September at Abunai! 2009 in Zwolle, Holland. Congratulations, everyone! Sorry about not recording it from the very beginning, but I was desperately trying to change the battery in my camcorder as fast as I could, in the dark.

[Watch in HD]

3RD PLACE

[Watch in HD]

Name: Hendrik Heekmann (Devilmastah)
Title: Emoticons
Audio: Hinoi Team – Emoticons
Video: Lucky Star

2ND PLACE

[Watch at YouTube]

Name: Linda Wijnen (Linnepin007)
Title: I’m Strange
Audio: Skye Sweetnam – I’m Strange And I Like It
Video: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

1ST PLACE

[Watch in HD]

Name: Wesley (Dnstje)
Title: De Wereld Draait Door
Audio: De Heideroosjes – De Wereld Draait Door [The world rushes by]
Video: Uh… it’s probably best to look at the many credits on his AMV. xD

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to travel to the Netherlands to attend Abunai, a convention to do with anime, manga and other Japanese stuff. The con lasted 3 days (Friday to Sunday), and we had to camp at a nearby place and travel between there and the convention site each day, using bikes we’d rented from the camp site.

So… for now, photos! Click any photo to see the full-size version. Here are a few which I took…

…and here are a lot more which a friend of mine took (including a few of mine, since he wanted to fill up his PhotoBucket account):