Månsteri Store is a place where you can get Arduino boards in its many varieties, sensors, basic electronic components, prototyping tools and much much more for your interactive art projects. Currently, I have distribution agreements with Arduino and SparkFun, but there might be some others in the near future. I try to only stock items that I have personally used and found to be useful in my own projects, but feel free to send me an email if you would like to get some specific stuff that is not on the website.

I already thought about doing this back in 2007 when I first started messing with the Arduino. Back then there were no Finnish Arduino distributors around and not so many elsewhere in Europe either. I couldn’t do it then, but the idea was stuck in my head.

Fast forward to 2011 and suddenly I have the resources to do it, so I thought: “Why not? It’s not like I’m working part-time at the university, doing dozens of art and design projects and trying to finish my MA studies at the same time. I have plenty of time to run an online store!”

For those who don’t know me personally, that is exactly what I’m doing + trying to have an actual life on top of that. Sometimes my stupidity surprises me…

Anyway, it’s been fun for the first few days since the store opened and the feedback has been great. A big thank you to all those supporting me! So head over to http://store.mansteri.com/ and shop til your voltage drops.

Månsteri Store is also on Facebook.

Thu 10/03/2011, 4:30 PM – Artist Talk

I will do a small artist talk/Q&A session at The Jyväskylä Art Museum. I will also do a small performance using The Beat Blender and Made In Iron controllers.

Fri 11/3/2011, 6 PM – The Future Roots & VJ Månsteri

I will be VJing to the sounds of The Future Roots in The Jyväkylä Art Museum. The visuals will be based on the cover art made by Minja Revonkorpi & Rita Vargas.

Sat 12/3 & Sun 13/3 – Arduino Workshop

On saturday and sunday I will do an Introduction to Arduino workshop. I’ll try to post some pictures about that during the weekend All the places for the workshop are reserved already.

More info about the whole Live Herring ’11 event. Lots of exhibitions, gigs, artist talks etc. Check it out.

More info:
Mediamaja
Facebook

Some of you might have seen the Animoitu liike -workshop I did in collaboration with Päivi Hintsanen and Live Herring in Jyväskylä public library (September 2009) http://www.liveherring.org/animoitu_liike/

This week I’m going to do part 2 of the workshop in Jyväskylä in collaboration with Loiskis. The Kinect sensor has greatly improved the project as I no longer need to use IR markers.

Here is a small demo. Running with a customized build of OSCeleton, Quartz Composer and Animata.

For demonstration purposes, I’m changing the character and the background by clapping my hands.

The drawings were made by students from the Keski-Palokka elementary school.

At the same time I fixed a major issue that had been there since I made the plugins. I’m using the VVOSC and VVBasics frameworks from http://code.google.com/p/vvopensource/ and I finally changed the class names to get rid of some errors when using the plugin with other software that uses the same frameworks.

Download from the Software page.

IMPORTANT!

Please remove all of my previous OSC plugins (AnimataOSC and MonsteriOSCSender) before installing this new plugin.

Trying out the very awesome OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton with Quartz Composer.

What is OSCeleton?
“As the title says, it’s just a small program takes Kinect skeleton data from the OpenNI framework and spits out the coordinates of the skeleton’s joints via OSC messages. These can can then be used on your language / framework of choice.”

It works straight out of the box with Animata and many other software, but the OSC formatting is not compatible with Quartz Composer. So I made a little Max/MSP patch that converts the messages to a format QC understands. I will try to write a tutorial about how to get the whole thing running pretty soon. But here is a quick rundown.

• Install OpenNI http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-binaries/20-latest-unstable
• Install KinectSensor http://github.com/avin2/SensorKinect
• Install NITE http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-compliant-middleware-binaries/33-latest-unstable
• Download OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton
• Download my OSCeletonToQC Max/MSP app and open it. (I think you need to install the Max Runtime from http://cycling74.com/downloads/)
• Dowload my QC example and open it
• Run OSCeleton with this command:

./osceleton-osx -p 8110 -mx 2 -my -2 -mz -1 -ox -1 -oy 0.75 -oz 1 -a 127.0.0.1

The options are to scale the values to something that makes sense in QC. You can play around with them. Check the OSCeleton readme for more information about the different options.

Let me know if the Max/MSP app or something else is not working properly.

Update on the Iron project. Not perfect but it’s starting to sound pretty decent. Listen through proper speakers or headphones to hear the full effect of the bass.

Testing my new instrument and ironing my wrinkly papers at the same time. This is the beat slicing mode. Still needs a lot of work but I wanted to shoot some documentation anyway.

It’s a wireless controller for making music.

Features include:
- 6 different modes
- A mega wobble bass generator
- Beat slicer
- Sampler
- ???

Tech specs:
- Senses the grayscale values of the surface
- Accelerometer
- Tactile feedback (vibration)
- RGB LED
- Completely wireless

Stay tuned for more.