The Flying V! Best use of shade structures to date! Home sweet home at 4:10 and Journey.

I’ll post pictures and stories later, but for right now I’m just going to put a little link up here for some folks on Reddit and those who didn’t make it out to Black Rock City this year. One of my favorite things to do at Burning Man is to go see Bootie drop some amazing mashup goodness on a crowd of incredibly happy burners. They give out CDs during the show, and as they don’t sell any of their music and give it away freely on the interwebs I don’t think there should be a problem posting the files here.

Without further adieu, I give you the contents of the CD Bootie gave out in BRC. Enjoy!

Click here to download Bootie BRC 2011 [320kbps - 165MB]

The Temple at Burning Man 2011 - Image (c) Reuters 2011

Note 1: I have no idea what Bootie CD this is or if it was especially made for Burning Man. I do know that they played almost every track off of it during one of their sets on the Playa.
Note 2: If this link becomes popular I’m going to have to take it down before my little server explodes. Maybe it’ll become a torrent at that point.
Note 3: Bootie, if you’re reading this and you want me to take this file down, please just drop me a note. I really love what you guys do and don’t want to degrade your control, image, distribution, etc in any way. I’m just trying to share what I believe to be free music with more people who also love you guys/gals.

Burning Man revelers - Image (c) Reuters 2011

Recently a fairly sizable number of resistive touchscreens fell off the back of the e-waste truck and into my lap so it’s time to hit the shop and make something fun. My good friend Jill of blinky light love has recently started doing all manner of awesome things with RGB lights and, well… it looked like a lot of fun. Around the same time, Donut was putting in an order for some ShiftBrites so I jumped on that reduced-shipping bandwagon and got 10 of these things. They’re exactly what you would want if you have an arduino (or other microcontroller) and like pretty things that are fairly robust, well designed, and pretty easy to control.

Shiftbrite v2

First up was seeing if the touch sensors were even operational – I meant it when I said they fell off the back of the e-waste truck. If you’re wondering how to hook these up or how they work, you should check out the excellent writeup over at Sparkfun or the PDF put together by HanTouchUSA. In general, you power one line, ground one line, and read the resulting voltage out of a third to get the output from one axis. Swap everything around you get the other axis. Busted out a scope, a power supply, and made a little breakout board for the flex cables after a brief evaluation of my soldering skills and the flex terminals (conclusion: I don’t want to solder every one of these things if there’s a possibility that I’m going to have to search dozens to find one that works)

Touchscreen attached to an oscilloscope

Some quick experimenting later I had the lines out of the touch sensor identified and hooked up to an oscilloscope. Brilliant!   Wiggling a finger over one axis and then three taps.   Sensor away! Not 100% linear, and a bit wibbly wobbly around the edges, but I’m not doing surgery so I think it’ll be just fine.

Arduino time! I found a simple and extremely useful library written by Jonathan Oxer that flips around the inputs/outputs as necessary and allowed me to read from my little four-wire touchscreen. After a bit of code modification to dump out some more information to the serial terminal I had my controller!

Next up: blinkies. External power seems to be the way to go with these things, so out came an old 6V wall wart to save the day. Remember to hook your grounds together! A quick Jack-‘n-Hack, this time with Digger 450’s code, to get the ShiftBrite control on lock. Originally my plan had been to make the touchscreen some part of an HSV color picker. We only have two axes, so without more hardware we’re only getting HS or HV. My first implementation was for HS but, as it turns out, HV is much more useful and allows you to play with the intensity and not blind yourself during development. More Jack-and-Hack on Stewart Russell’s code got me a suitable HSV to RGB transformation method. Sure, it only goes to 255 on each channel and the ShiftBrites can do better, but I’m ok downgrading to 16 million colors from a billion+.

So how did it turn out? Here’s the video proof. Would like for the code to differentiate between dragging finger and tapping states but that isn’t critical and… well, we’ll see if I end up needing it.   The code is up on gitHub should you want to make your own blinkie light selection.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

If you’re really interested in the touchscreens hit me up on twitter and we’ll work something out. There’s no way I’m going to use all of these.

The following will do absolutely no justice to the topic. At all. Should it sound enjoyable and should you find yourself lacking a sense of self preservation/modesty/etc. I invite you to join us in 48 weeks when we really go to burning man.

As you may have figured from my previous post or the following comments, Donut and I went to Burning Man this year as part of a two-man scouting team. What we found will surely fill volumes and can’t be described in a blog post. If you’d like to hear stories put a few drinks in either of us (or both for the duo show. Our specialty!) and we’ll talk your ear off with madcap adventures.

For those of you haven’t seen us since (and thus still have your ears) burning man is best described as a post-apocalyptic-bacchanalian-art-festival-and-mass-survivalist-crash-course. You go to the desert and you survive in all the best ways possible. The playa (the “city” is built in a dried up lake bed) has the final word on all actions and you just ride out life for a week with 45,000 of your newest friends. Yeah, 45,000+ people make the trek to Reno Nevada and then head 75 miles north up a one lane service road to go survive the crap out of a week. Google may help me with the issue of describing scale: Yeah, it’s on google maps.

Other factoids:

• No money. You barter/trade/gift for everything that isn’t ice or coffee (sold at center camp)
• No water/food/anything. You want it, you pack it in.
• No trash. If you brought it in and it didn’t pass through your body (or at least make a decent stop in your stomach for a while) you’re packing it back out.
• Fire… it’s a big deal.
• Art…. that sound you just heard was the echo from my mind blowing.
• Oh just google it if you’re interested; It’s time for a few pictures.

These pictures and many more are available on Flickr but here’s a few I liked enough to post again:

This… this is a happy night…

The only thing I bought the entire week:

Sometimes you’ve just gotta ride with Jabba…

Fire Duck! The duck that runs of FIRE.

This is the Fire Organ. Yes it plays music. You can see Prudence (the woman who shot Mal in Firefly) playing it in the background. She, and this Fire Organ are balls-out crazy.

How do you survive a sand storm? YOU BECOME THE SANDPEOPLE!! HUUUUA HAAA HUUUUUUAALRG!
(This is Donut and I showing off our survival gear… and being Sandpeople.)

Speaking of dust and sand: Your hair may take on an… elderly look while on the Playa.

Our intrepid crew. I would survive myself to death anywhere with these fine people.

The Man. He Burns. That’s over 200 feet of fire. When the final explosion went off it set up a 600′ tall mushroom cloud of awesome. It was physically warm where we were standing… over a quarter of a mile away.

Oh and if minds were not bent enough: check out this AMAZING spider walker that I snagged a video of. This thing has to be 12 feet tall and weigh a few tonns. It’s powered but a huge V8 and would take an AT-AT downTOWN any day of the week.

And so the sun sets on our adventure… (oh yeah, I went there.)

To set the scale: Those wings are made out of HUGE sheets of metal and the figure in the middle is a normal-sized human goddess dancer.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this rant: Nothing I can say in a blog post could come NEAR to describing what the Burning Man experience is other than yelling “EPIC” at the top of my lungs. (It is NOT a soCal hippy music fest. The next person who asks me “who’s playing” shall feel the full wrath of a blogger angered)

Should you care to push past my “EPIC!” outbursts, I’d be more than happy to share stories along with the never-ending pictures/video.

So all in all this year’s scouting mission went better than ever could have been expected. Next year: we’re doing this thing in full glory.

48 weeks till the Man burns!

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