The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds. - Theo Jansen

Absolut Choir

Today was the first day of the RAG-TAG* workshop. I didn’t have time to see all the speakers but luckily I made it in time for Bengt Sjölén from Teenage Engineering. Here is a brief report from his talk:

Using Absolut Choir** as an example Bengt started of by talking about the importance of building scalable systems and the advantages of being able to remotely control, update and monitor installations. He then went on to highlight the benefits of using embedded Linux devices (such as the NSLU2 and the ASUS WL-HDD) instead of or together with micro controllers and PCs.

Embedded Linux devices do unlike micro controllers often have USB and networking capabilities and since they run Linux you can write full fledged applications for them in your language of choice. They usually lack the inputs and outputs that are necessary to communicate with sensors and actuators, but on the other hand they can communicate with micro controllers such as Arduinos over USB. Their advantage to PCs are their physical dimensions and their prices, which now are getting close to Arduinos.

After having having talked about embedded Linux devices Bengt finished of by discussing the possibilities of building new platforms for creative engineering around chipset such as the Sunplus SPHE 82xx which normally are found in cheap DVD players. The SPHE 82xx chipset are capable of outputting video and 6.1 audio as well as controlling servos and motors. Their limitations lie in their undocumented and closed firmware but there are now Yahoo groups dedicated to understanding and analyzing that.

An Arduino-like platform with video and audio outputs that is capable of running applications written in Processing or openFrameworks doesn’t seem that far from becoming a reality. All that is needed is a community to organize itself around some of the inexpensive embedded Linux devices and multimedia chipset that already exist on the market…

*The parents of RAG-TAG VIDEO AND MOVIE SITES are the project Grig and Performing Pictures of The Interactive Institute with support by The Culture 2000 framework of the European Commission.

**Absolut Choir is an architectural installation consisting of a robotic choir which people can conduct over the Internet. The installation and website are both impressively well built. It is currently up and running at the PUB department store in Stockholm. A lot of information about the design and technology behind the installation is available on the website.