Patrick McCarthy to Address the Rotary Club

Patrick has been invited to speak at the Rotary Club's weekly luncheon. Patrick has been striving for years towards a teaching career that focuses on eliminating technophobia in his students via Circuit Bending workshops and performances. He will be giving a brief impromptu performance, a short lecture on the Acquired Technology Arts, and its use in preparing students for high tech careers.

MEECAS 2010

". . . for electronics junkies it's like being in a candy store."

- The Onion

Saturday, November 13 :
Lizard's Liquid Lounge, 3058 W Irving Park Rd. (map)
The 3rd annual Midwestern Experimental Electronics Conference and Showcase (MEECAS) is a free, day-long symposium highlighting the past year's accomplishments in the areas of Musical Instrument Design, Performance, Circuit Bending, Data Hacking, and Video Art.

CONFERENCE : Noon - 3:00 PM
The MEECAS begins with a three-hour circuit bent open mic, and an open “horizontal lecture series” structured around a free hardware hacking workshop wherein all participants are both teacher and student. The conversation will focus on networking, hacking techniques, project demonstrations, and setting goals for the next year.

DINNER - 3:00 PM
Order some carry out, and continue the conversation and networking into the evening.

SHOWCASE : 8:00 PM - Midnight
The MEECAS continues into the evening with live performances featuring:

• Tim Kaiser, Duluth, MN
• Roth Mobot, Chicago, IL
• Welcome Tomerica, Chicago, IL
• Alex Inglizian, Chicago, IL
• Will Soderberg, Chicago, IL
• CMKT4, DeKalb, IL

VIDEO : 8:00 PM - Midnight
In addition to the live video mix work of The Machinist, the evening portion of the MEECAS will include pieces from some of the Midwest's (and Europe's) premier Glitch artists, featuring:

• (steven) Buck, Chicago, IL
• Spright Light Theater, Minneapolis, MN
• Hugo Paquete, Portugal

INTERACTIVE INSTALLATIONS : 7:00 PM - 1:00 AM
The MEECAS audience is encouraged to explore interactive electronic installations created by:

• Michel Una, Chicago, IL - LIFE Synth
• Sam Piro, Evanston, IL - Circle Machine, Jr.
• Kim Alpert, Chicago, IL - Stolen
• Patrick McCarthy, Chicago, IL - Graphite Synth
• Telekinetica, Chicago, IL - Plasma Ball Boom Box

MEECAS STORE : 7:00 PM - 1:00 AM
Exhibiting and performing artists will be selling recorded works, experimental musical instruments, electronics kits, and apparel to offset the cost of the show.

CALL FOR DEAD BATTERIES
	Please bring your dead batteries to the MEECAS and we will send them to a proper eWaste recycling center.

MEECAS 2010 LIVE WEBCAST : 8:00 PM - Midnight CST

SPECIAL THANKS :

• Créme Dementia, MEECAS 2010 Video Documentation
• Tom Young, MEECAS 2010 Photo Documentation
• (steven) Buck, MEECAS 2010 Audio Documentation
• Patrick McCarthy & (steven) Buck, MEECAS 2010 Staging and Lighting
• Carl Broman, MEECAS 2010 Webcast Documentation
• Ruth & Johnny, MEECAS 2010 Bartenders
• Lizard's Liquid Lounge, the Room
• Cody's on Albany, for their Convenient Location
• You, the MEECAS 2010 Audience

New Devices - August 2010

Hybrid Hacked Vocaid Incantor

Both Tommy and Patrick contributed custom circuitry to this device. There are two loop switches and three glitch switches, as well as pitch control. Tommy finished the exterior.

Untitled Dark Keyboard

Presented with a found keyboard, we installed a classic clock bend with three pitch electrodes.

Roth Mobot Back from OFFF Paris 2010

Roth Mobot was invited to conduct a presentation about, and performance of, their DIY approach to soundscape production using their homemade electronic devices and circuit bent toys at the 10th annual OFFF Design Conference. The festival was huge, taking up multiple floors of Paris' La Grande Halle de La Villette. We have tons of photos and videos, not only from the festival itself, but from our brief stay in the City of Lights. 
OFFF Paris 2010 Opening Titles
Created by the Academy Award winning design team, The Mill

Roth Mobot's Presentation & Performance at OFFF

Roth Mobot at OFFF Festival in Paris!

Roth Mobot is performing opening night at the OFFF Festival in Paris, France.

The three-day OFFF Festival is more than a design conference, it's a digital multimedia festival. OFFF is spreading the work of a generation of makers, inventors, and artists that are setting new limits by growing with recent technology and receiving inspiration from a whole new tool set.

This is such an unusual and excellent gig for us that it requires a little extra attention. Although the festival is paying for our flight and our hotel accommodations, we still have to pay for our food, and to ship our equipment across the Atlantic (twice).

We have set up a Donate button on our web site. It's a secure connection to PayPal where any small donation would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you send us your postal address we will send you a post card from Paris! We leave this Tuesday and our goal is $500. Thank you.

Third Annual Experimental Garage Sale

Experimental Garage Sale 2010, June 5th. Noon-5PM

At the Experimental Sound Studio
 5925 N Ravenswood, Chicago, IL 60660 (map) 773-769-1069

Circuit Bent Instruments, Un-Bent Gear, Parts, Vintage Components, Guitar Pedals, Custom Lamps, GetLoFi Kits, and More! WITH SPECIAL DRAWING AT 3:00 PM!! Prizes include custom devices and electronics kits from the Midwest's premier experimental electronics artists including Roth Mobot, Talking Computron, Reed Ghazala, and MORE!

10 Sellers!

1. Tommy S. rothmobot.com 
2. Patrick M. rothmobot.com 
3. Mike aa9il.com 
4. Steve site.properboy.com 
5. thejunkyard catalist myspace.com/ThriftsoreBoratorium 
6. Creme Dementia myspace.com/CremeDeMentia 
7. GetLoFi.com getlofi.com 
8. Low-Gain lowgain-audio.com 
9. Tim Kaiser htimkaiser.org 
10. Buck stevenbuck.us/

More Info:
http://www.gelofi.com
http://www.experimentalsoundstudio.org/

Arduino / Hacked Toy Internet Alert Circuit

Overview
Zach Kaplan recently invited Roth Mobot to the Chicago offices of Inventables to lead their monthly Lab session wherein guests speak about the various recent crossovers of technology and creativity. At first we were asked to conduct a hands-on toy hacking session with Inventables' employees, but about a week before our arrival we were given the circuit bending challenge of creating an "interface between the Internet and a common circuit bent toy."

Basic Data Flow

We decided to create a circuit that would activate a toy whenever someone logged into Roth Mobot's web site. We designed a simple and elegant solution using an Arduino, a homemade Vactrol, a common electronic toy, and three simple scripts written in different programming languages. We'd like to thank William Swyter for lending us his Arduino, and Factory Smoke for his Vactrol suggestion, which stopped us from creating overly-complicated custom circuitry with transistors and diodes, and made the programming a piece of cake. The result was an elegant circuit that electrically insulates the toy from the Arduino (and the computer) by "optically coupling" them with light.

 
Vactrol Construction
We've included a diagram of how to build a Vactrol. All you need is a bright LED, and a Cadmium Sulfide photo resistor. We used black epoxy for our casing.

Arduino / Vactrol Hook Up
We plugged the Vactrol's LED's ground lead into the Arduino's ground socket, and it's positive lead into the Arduino's number 13 socket. We used socket number 13 because it has a built in resistor.

Vactrol / Hacked Toy Hook Up
We then connected the two leads from the Vactrol's photo resistor to two leads coming out of a hacked police truck toy. The beauty of this approach is that it doesn't matter what the voltage of the toy is or whether it's "voltage triggered" or "ground triggered."

Video of Circuit in Action
Now when someone logs into our web site the circuit bent police truck toy lights up and says, "Slow down, pull over!" in a demonic voice.


Sample PHP  Code 
We embedded this common basic hit counter in our home page

<?php  $count_my_page = ("hitcounter.txt"); 
$hits = file($count_my_page); 
$hit = trim($hits[0]); 
$hit++; 
$fp = fopen($count_my_page , "w"); 
fputs($fp , "$hit"); 
fclose($fp); 
echo $hit; 
?>; 

Sample Python Code 
This is the Python script that runs on the computer attached to the Arduino and the hacked toy. It requires the PySerial library extension to be installed. The only part of the code we had to change was the Arduio's serial port and the location of the TXT file being generated by the PHP script on our server. (highlighted below). 

# fetch txt file

import time
import urllib
import serial

# USB serial connection to Arduino

ser = serial.Serial(
   'com4', 115200)
myUrl = 'http://www.YOURWEBSITE.COM/hitcounter.txt'

last_counter = urllib.urlopen(myUrl).read()
while (True):
  counter = urllib.urlopen(myUrl).read()
  delta = int(counter) - int(last_counter)
  print "counter: %s, delta: %s" % (counter, delta)
  ser.write(chr(ord(chr(delta))))
  last_counter = counter
  time.sleep(10)

Sample Arduino Code 
This code was originally used to activate a servo motor. We Frankensteined it with some other code to light the Vactrol's LED. 

int ledPin = 13; 
int minPulse = 0; 
int maxPulse = 10; 
int pulse = 0; 
int rings = 0; 
long nextMillis = 0; 
long lastPulse = 0; 
int refreshTime = 200; 
int state = 0; 
 
void setup() {
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); 
  pulse = minPulse; 
  Serial.begin(115200);
}

#define PULSE_ON       0
#define WAIT_PULSE_ON  1
#define PULSE_OFF      2
#define WAIT_PULSE_OFF 3
 
void loop() {
  
  if (Serial.available() > 0) {
    rings += Serial.read();
    Serial.println(rings);
  }
   
  if (rings > 0) {
      digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);  // LED on
      delay(200);                  // wait
      digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);   // LED off
  }
  if (rings = 0) {
      digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);   // LED off
  }
  }