Work in progress: Arduino powered Beer brewing machine

Well some of you already realized that every few months I am brewing beer by my own with my high school-mate Hannes. We’re changing our mixture every time because we want to test new sorts of beer and improve our own mixtures. While we were really surprised that even our first attempt was ‘drinkable’, our last one was even better.

Hannes used all his knowledge to build our own boiler which will be able to brew 30 L beer. While brewing beer it is important to stay at certain levels of temperature that we had to do manually in the past. In our boiler we attached temperature- & fluid-level sensors. Their data is being used by an Arduino to control the heating element which consumes up to 3.3k Watt (!) so we’re using a remote controlled electrical jack to control it.

Our prototype-interface has been implemented in Max/MSP which is used to send temperature & timing data to the Arduino, so that the brewing process can be run without an attached computer or any other interface. Sensor-data will be stored in a database for further analyses.

This project is still work in progress and we want to use our brewing machine (we call it ‘Reaktor’ …) in the end of September.
Below I attached one of my first Arduino-tests đŸ˜‰

More infos soon & you can ask me for any further details đŸ˜‰

United Laptop Orchestra

The United Laptop Orchestra started as a follow-up project out of Stephan Athanas’ MaxMSP-course at the Hochschule Lucerne in 2011. The students were able to built their own synthesizer & soundprocessing MaxMSP-patches.

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Continue reading United Laptop Orchestra

Aetherophone: a Theremin written in Max/MSP using a distance sensor and some magic.

Simple technique, but quite impressive: A Theremin built with Max/MSP and Arduino plus a distance sensor. The lights are also controlled by the Arduino using relays. An additional tremolo-effekt makes the sound a little bit more interesting.

 

Interactive: Freeze by André Seiler & André Motz

Freeze has been developed for the course “Fotografische Inszenierung mittels Fotografie” by Fritz Franz Vogel and “MaxMSP_Jitter von 0 auf 100 in 2 Semestern” by Stephan Athanas in January, 2011.
A trapped person tries to get the viewer’s audience by shouting and crying regularly and asks for help. But if you try to help the caught person, Freezer may trap you.

Continue reading Interactive: Freeze by André Seiler & André Motz

In process: Wikipedia Information Visualization

Think of all those millions who put their energy into Wikipedia day and day to push it forward – and now you’ve got an idea what amount of data is being produced every day. We could use this kind of data for different information-visualizations and that is exactly what I’m trying to do.
One could use all the metadata that’s being generated to get an idea of what article and which topics are of interest of the moment. Of course you could use data like headlines and news articles which is a good approach in my mind, but Wikipedia would be special, because its data is being generated by a kind of average user.
We’ll stay in contact đŸ™‚

Continue reading In process: Wikipedia Information Visualization