This September, Parallax has been in business for 35 years. As part of our celebration, we asked our customers to tell us your Parallax story. This is one we received from our community which will be shared throughout the month.
Hi Ken!
I started with the BASIC Stamp — I think I saw an ad in Popular Electronics? I built a prototype coin changer for a California chain of laundromats with it, and to the best of my knowledge, they took my design and installed them.
I then discovered Jon McPhalen’s articles in Nuts-n-Volts. Over time I have bought dozens of Propellers for various projects, mainly for Burning Man. Jon has been the most fabulous mentor for me!
My projects include:
A sound-to-light wall built with a propeller driving a big pile of salvaged DMX-controlled RGB neon (yes, neon) lights.
The Sonic Reactor uses laser range finders to determine the distance of a participant’s hands from them, with distance related to the musical scale (each cm equaled one note on the grand scale). The Propeller 1 sends MIDI messages and would scan buttons, enabling the participant to change voices on the synth. DMX messages would again be used to change the lighting with the show.
I also made a wearable version, SR Jr. (photos above).
My partner and I were consigned to build ten lanes of skee ball for The Life Is Beautiful festival in Las Vegas. With a twist. When a ball went in a hole, fire shot out of the hole. The video is shown above.
Fire skee ball was built modularly, with one Propeller 1 control box running two lanes each, as well as the scoring and the WS2812s. Lots of Jon’s drivers are utilized in my projects (and SparkFun’s super large LED 8 segment displays, haha. That was a brain bender for me to bit-bang a driver for those with Spin!).
Here’s a 17-second prototype video of another flame project called the Kosmik Kalliope (as part of my Burning Man Theme Camp, Kosmik Dust) which is Propeller 1 driven; MIDI interfaced to a piano keyboard to drive an octave of flame effects:
I’m a fabricator, kinetic artist, electronics tech jack of all trades, not a programmer. Without eight cores of the Propeller 1, I never would have been able to pull half of this stuff off!
P.S., lots of other small projects too, like the Theramyd (a four-foot high acrylic pyramid with a hybrid hardware synth (analog synth with digital MIDI front end) and light show inside. Participants played it like a Theramin through a URF….
The Shrine to Frau Bleucher (from the movie Young Frankenstein(o:)….. The Kosmik Annunciator….. anyway, I’ve had TOO much fun with your stuff!
FSB at LIB:
And me wearing Sonic Reactor Jr., with a Prop running 2 URFs, and running Ariba’s General MIDI sound emulator, with motorcycle speakers hanging off the bottom haha! The battery pack is on my back (o:
Looking forward to meeting you someday!
Cheers!
Dirk Schmidhofer
