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Propeller Powered Movie & Live Show Prop — Parallax Forums

Propeller Powered Movie & Live Show Prop

JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
edited 2017-11-01 14:15 in Propeller 1
This gorgeous prop -- which is powered by the Propeller, of course -- was built by my friend, Matt Hawkins (www.likeform.com) for Midnight Syndicate (www.midnightsyndicate.com). It uses an EFX-TEK HC-8+ as the controller with a SEETRON 4x20 OLED dsiplay (on front), NeoPixel strips for the tower, and a bunch of my drivers that Matt knitted together. There are a variety of switches an pots on the front that change the behavior. The production wanted the device to look "home built" and Matt did an excellent job of that, going so far as to use old-school Dymo labels for the switch and pot markings.

After the film was shot we added a remote control for the live show. The remote is an XBee radio, batteries, a pot, and a button. The Propeller uses the internal XBee to do a Remote AT command to read the pot and button from the remote XBee -- works really well and kept the remote unit very simple (no programming, just XBee configuration).

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Comments

  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
    edited 2017-11-01 04:02
    Here's a picture of the prop and remote from Matt's bench.

    ms_prop_remote.jpg

    ms_prop_remote.jpg
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  • rosco_pcrosco_pc Posts: 464
    I always enjoy these creations. Congrats to your friend for a job well done.
    just curious: what is it supposed to do? Time travel machine?
  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
    edited 2017-11-01 15:10
    It's a ghost detector. As the spectral energy increases, the on-screen display changes and the lighted tower on top intensifies. In the film, an actor could manipulate the prop behavior. For the stage show, they wanted the device to respond without anyone touching it; this is what lead to the remote control. The prop firmware sends a query to the XBee in the remote. If it responds within 25ms, the pot and button values from the remote are used. If there is no response, the local pot value is used.

    Matt is a very talented designer and I love working with him on projects.
  • Martin_HMartin_H Posts: 4,051
    It looks awesome. It reminds me of a home-brew tube ham radio.
  • DrPopDrPop Posts: 227
    That's a sweet looking rig! Thanks for showing us what's possible, gets the creative juices flowing. :cool:
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    I does indeed look like the tube receivers I was building in the 1970's. Dymo labels and all.

    It also looks the ghost detector a hardware engineer I worked with built for real in the late 1980's.

    His machine never detected any ghosts as far as I remember but it made a very good data logger that people wanted to buy. He ended up quitting his job and started a company to produce them.

  • JonMJonM Posts: 318
    Very cool Jon.

    I would love to work on these type of projects.
    It would be cool to see this and Matt on Adam Savage's Tested show.

    Thanks for sharing this.
  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
    edited 2017-11-01 19:37
    Matt has been on Tested a couple times (Monsterpalooza episodes) and has met Adam -- one time he showed him the DEF CON 22 badge which I helped design and wrote code for, along with my IronMac shield for it.

    If you've watched Tested, you've also seen Frank Ippolito. He's a friend of ours. I've done a couple simple things for Frank, including the pulsing control for his Han Solo in Carbonite refrigerator (he handed me a Schmarschmino, so I had to use it).
  • Jeff HaasJeff Haas Posts: 421
    Is the short film available online? Would love to see this running.
  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
    edited 2017-11-01 19:34
    I will ask Ed (Midgnight Syndicate) if he's going to post the short film.

    Matt sent me this small clip that shows the prop working, though it doesn't show off the tower lighting animation much -- the tower does a lot more than is shown in this video.


  • JonMJonM Posts: 318
    JonnyMac wrote: »
    Matt has been on Tested a couple times (Monsterpalooza episodes) and has met Adam -- one time he showed him the DEF CON 22 badge which I helped design and wrote code for, along with my IronMac shield for it.

    If you've watched Tested, you've also seen Frank Ippolito. He's a friend of ours. I've done a couple simple things for Frank, including the pulsing control for his Han Solo in Carbonite refrigerator (he handed me a Schmarschmino, so I had to use it).

    Very nice. Funny you mention Frank Ippolito, I just started to listening to his and Len Peralta's CreatureGeek Podcast on Tested. Very cool info and Frank has a real interesting back story. I'll have to check out the Monsterpalooza episodes on Tested.

    The vid of the prop is awesome. Thanks for posting it.
  • Jeff HaasJeff Haas Posts: 421
    Thanks for the link to the video, it looks great!

    That SEETRON display reads very well, nice and vivid. How do you drive it?
  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
    It's an OLED display. I wrote a simple object for it that is attached.
    spin
    spin
    jm_glo-416_nc.spin
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  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    JonnyMac wrote: »
    It's an OLED display. I wrote a simple object for it that is attached.
    Does the OLED display handle the character generation itself? It looks like you're just writing to it as if it were a terminal.
  • JohnR2010JohnR2010 Posts: 431
    Love it!! Enjoyed your xBee API article in Nuts and Volts as well!! Well done!!
  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,104
    JohnR2010 wrote: »
    Love it!! Enjoyed your xBee API article in Nuts and Volts as well!! Well done!!
    Thanks!

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