As I live in Berlin and student tickets are cheap, I have no need for a car and use only public transport for getting from A to B. The only problem is that I can't remember the departure times of all those trains and buses...

Saturday at about 5 p.m. I decided that I really needed a fancy, realtime-updated display with the departure times of the nearby bus and S-Bahn railway stations. A few hours of hacking later (and 15 minutes today for assembling) everything was finished :)

Now I won't miss my trains anymore at the station. And if it's delayed, I won't be too early at the station for nothing (the departure times are also correctly updated in this case).

Used tools: A milk-glass cabinet door from IKEA as table, An old G4 PowerBook, an old 15" TFT, (don't laugh) the MiniKidsGames framework (based on RubyCocoa), around 80 lines of Ruby code and some XML/XPath queries for parsing output from VBB online with the REXML library.

Posted by sebastian at 9:19 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

laptoprockers.eu is a hip tech blog aimed at digital music producers. They have published an interview with us. There you can find out more about the history of The Wiinstrument—and how it works :)

Posted by sebastian at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is a guide for all Windows users that explains how to connect your Wiimote to the BlueSoleil stack to use it with The Wiinstrument.

Continue reading… »

Posted by tobias at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

If you have an Intel mac and Mac OS X Leopard, we've got a new release of The Wiinstrument for you.

Download The Wiinstrument 0.2b1151 for Intel macs with Leopard here.

Like the last Windows release, this version is an in-between release on the way to version 0.3, aimed at people who switched to MacOS X Leopard lately. It's not working on PowerPC processors, but the next release should work on PPC again.

This build includes a new, experimental UI for the DrumStiicks (MIDI) mode, shown on the image above.

Have fun with it! :)

Sebastian / screenfashion.org

Update: It seems that this version works only on Intel machines with Leopard installed. We're working on a fix, till then, try one of the old versions that are mentioned in the comments...

Posted by sebastian at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (1)

Good things come to those who wait.

Well, unfortunately it took us a lot more time to port "The Wiinstrument" to Windows than promised, but polishing the UI for the Microsoft OS required some extra work. Thanks to Sebastian, who has created some nifty bitmaps and UI changes. The Wiinstrument UI looks equally great on all platforms now. Credits fly also out to Julian, who has put some extra effort into a redesign of the Gosu library, which now supports OpenGL under Windows.

The Wiinstrument 0.2.1 is an in-between release, so you'll get to experience some nice features originally planned for version 0.3 (see the changelog for more infos), but many of the really great things are still missing.

Visit SourceForge and download the first Windows release of The Wiinstrument!

Continue reading… »

Posted by tobias at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

You are using Flash, Director, or Flex on a macintosh and want to use Wii remote input for your application? Till now, there was only one solution: Switching to Windows and using the WiiFlash API. Now, there's another possibility: MoteDaemon.

MoteDaemon discovers Wii remotes in range, connects to them and listens on a TCP socket for incoming connections from your Flash/Flex application. When your application is connected, it instantly receives Wiimote motion and button data in a simple XML format. We decided to provide all sources and a little example Flash application for free. The XML parser is encapsulated in a little class, so it should really be straightforward to use. Have fun with it!

Download it

The application including sources is available as a ZIP archive on SourceForge.

How about WiiFlash app compatibility?

We've already contacted the WiiFlash team—as soon as we get a short documentation of their binary data format, we'll make MoteDaemon compatible to WiiFlash client applications so that they can also run on MacOS X.

Beta

The software is still in beta stage. If you find a bug, we'd be happy if you could report it to us by mail. Crash reports are most helpful when they contain a stack trace to find out where the application crashed exactly: Just include your ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MoteDaemon.crash.log file in the report for this.

Posted by sebastian at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (32) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi,

It's finally done. You can download the latest version of The Wiinstrument for Mac OS X and Linux as well as the C++ sources at SourceForge.

The Linux version can be found here and the Mac OS X version here (the application) and here (source code as Xcode project folder).

(Update: Release 0.2b745 fixes a bug and should now work on Intel macs!)

Continue reading… »

Posted by tobias at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Playing drums with your Wii remote in GarageBand? No problem. Here's how you do it…

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Posted by sebastian at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (54) | TrackBacks (2)

Hi,

We are back from IFA 2007 fair in Berlin. We were not really prepared for the interest that The Wiinstrument has produced, but everything went very well—The software appears to be really stable once a Wii remote is connected. As I was forced to practice eight hours per day while demonstrating The Wiinstrument's capabilities, my rhythm skills seem to have really improved… :)

Thanks to all visitors of our stand at IFA fair, your feedback is invaluable! If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

A release of version 0.2 for MacOS X, Linux and Windows will be available in a few days on this page. Meanwhile you could try the old 0.1 release (OSX only)…

If you consider buying a Bluetooth dongle for connecting a Wii remote on Windows, please consult the WiiLi wiki first—some Bluetooth devices seem to be incompatible to Wii remotes.

External material

The Wiinstrument as background music: Short video clip of cczwei (ex WDR computerclub) visiting IFA

An interview with ‘Handelsblatt’

An interview with techvideoblog.com

Some images of the event

(Thanks to Robert, a fellow student at University of Potsdam, who took the photos)

Bye,
Sebastian and Tobias / screenfashion.org

Posted by sebastian at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've uploaded a short video with me playing The Wiinstrument's Drumstiicks mode:

I'm not a drummer, but I think the instrument is real fun if you practice a bit.

We're still working on 0.2 – expect a release soon!
0.2 will be released with the following features (among others):
- Use pitch and roll rotation axes of Wii remote and Nunchuk as MIDI controllers
- A better graphical frontend
- a tiny sampler (load own WAV files into the Wiinstrument instead of a MIDI setup)

Continue reading… »

Posted by sebastian at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Digg this! | Add to del.icio.us | Add to reddit | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)