boogiepants

An evening of boogiepants pride

Boogiepants was a big hit at Pumping Station One's Geek Prom last night. It was displayed as part of the science fair for the evening. A couple folks tried on the actual pants, though there were no performances. Lots of folks were really excited about the idea, and got to play a little with it.

Besides that, two things to be happy about:

• no one spilled beer on my laptop;
• got to meet Jestin from Kansas City's Cowtown Computer Congress, who is helping me with some technical open-source issues;
• the code ran for seven hours without falling over! With people playing around with it and everything! No memory leaks, no locking issues, no instability of any sort! Rock solid code! Woohoo!

Of course, famous last words, it'll probably crash in the middle of the first performance or something. But realtime code running without a hitch for seven hours, that's pretty good for me.

boogiepants 0.2.0--on the edge of usefulness

Just uploaded the latest boogiepants release. Contains:

• the new pelvic circle and toggle instruments;
• an editor that's pretty comprehensive and works reasonably well--well, no undo, and no edit of instrument properties, but those will come at some point soon (well, when someone wants them);
• a demo of scratching a loop with the pelvic circle;
• everything comes out of the .pants file. When you start up, all the sets are blank. The previous default sets are now packaged with the download in boogiepants/resources/example.pants

added a lot here.

Next up: a Windows port, and documentation. My little beast is getting complicated, and people will need instruction on how to use and tame it.

oooh... Nintendo six-axis technology...

So we have a date for Nintendo's Motion Plus device. July 26 (my birthday, coincidentally.) I'll need Java drivers, but it would definitely change boogiepants.

One minus: you'd need two of both--the Wiimote and the Motion Plus, which would be $120 full retail. Still better than Sparkfun can currently do. Don't get me wrong, I love Sparkfun, but I gotta prioritize what the customer needs.

been a while...

It's been a while since I posted here. Lots of progress, in a number of directions:

Involvement with actual dancers. Yes, I did the dumb thing going off and writing code that I thought would be cool, without talking to people who would, you know, use it. For longer than I care to admit. But it seems to have worked out ok. Shorty is excited, though busy. Mae Phillips is also involved now. She does middle eastern dance, and belly dance, and teaches dance.

They've both done different versions of the 'actual pants.' I put 'actual pants' in quotes, because none of them really qualify as pants. None have a crotch. Lots of pockets, in various places. Mae did this fabulous black spandex thing, that laces up in the back like a corset. After lots of experimentation, we put the wiimote in a pocket on her chest. She's short, so that distance helps her move her pelvis more independently. The nunchuk seems to work best on the pelvis, but we're still experimenting with that.

Still no video yet, but that will come soon. We have to invent choreography for this.

Of course, they were excited about different things than I was. I love the strike instruments, they seem to prefer the scale one. They wanted something that would do a 'scale' with a hip pivot--both Shorty and Mae asked me about it on separate occasions.  Sunday morning I woke up with code writing itself feverishly in my head, assembling itself out of other things I'd already done. Monday evening I had something that could be useful. A screenshot:

Not a great color choice, but that's easy to change. The 'stick' is the box on an angle below. The box above is a visual reference for the instruments. The pointy thing below is a cone, you go around the cone to control a tone, or whatever you happen to be controlling.

While I'm at it, the strike instruments:

 

I have these set to play gamelan bells, from something I downloaded off freesound.org. It'll come with the next release.

The editor is moving at this point, but a little slowly. You can add strike instruments, grab them, move them around. Deleting is buggy. There's a bug in Java 3D I have to work around, and it's an ugly hack. I have to just break down and do it.

I also need to port to Windows. Mae runs a Windows laptop. I have to run an image of Windows on my Mac. I'm liking Parallels more and more.

The editor...

...is coming along. Fundamental pieces are implemented--loading, saving, creating a new .pants file, all that works. The .pants files are restructured in a way most folks won't care about, but makes things easier. Next up, importing shapes, and then actual editing.

(I so love that--the .pants file. Aren't I just so clever? :)

But as great as all that is, it doesn't add any useful function yet, so it's not an occasion to do a release. The code is checked in on sourceforge, so if you wanna do a build, knock yourself out.

On the actual pants front, my partner-in-crime Shorty is in Jamaica for a couple weeks, so that's on hold, but when she gets back, it's full speed ahead. We're planning to unveil in early April.

boogiepants 0.1.2--more code for you to love

There are a few modifications to boogiepants in this release:

• a full-screen mode: pretzel-F and you get the boogiepants display window in full-screen glory;
• cleanup of the user interface: when you start up, you get the control panel, with a button to sync with the Wii Remote. No more killing the app and restarting to retry when syncing fails;
• menus at the top of the screen, almost like a real application. Not all implemented, but that's the next step.

For you, the downloading! Go! For me, on to the editor.

Boogiepants alpha is ready for its public

Sure, it's got some rough edges, but that's why we call it alpha. Boogiepants is here! I've proven the technology--it does what I envisioned, on a very basic level. Now it's time to add features, to test, to work with dancers and djs and maybe even 3D modelers, and prove the concept.

Come play! contact me!