Thoughts about my next experiment, ukulele arduino and merapi

I’m thinking about a new experiment.
Here’s the thing, I love playing Ukulele. Once a Month we organize a playalong.
There are people who never played an instrument before and others that are regulars.
Together with my Friend Marcel, creator of ukulele.nl has made a really nice chordfinder
I will be making a version 2.

Here’s the though: what if ?:
I could build a Ukulele that shows the fingering of the chords ON THE UKULELE!
And even have it sync to the chords shown on screen?

What do you think, wouldn’t this be a cool Merpai/Arduino/Ukulele project?

Merapi now open source, converted arduino experiment

At Flex360 The Merapi-project went open-source.
So I decided to convert the LivingColors Experiment back from a server client model (Wowza + flash client) back to a single machine setup.

So I got an arduino-board and custom shield, a java-application that connects to the serial port on one side and to an Air-app on the other via the Merapi Bridge. The Air app gets an average color from the center of a webcam image and sends it to the java, which in turn sends the number (color) to the serial port. That’s all.

I do need to tweak some stuff, so that there’s less jitter.

[update]
More on the Arduino – Livingcolors shield can be found here : http://static.knutsel.org/kits/CC2500_Arduino_Shield_v03/ (in Dutch).

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The new arduino Experiment update

Here’s my latest Arduino Experiment.
It’s an arduino decimila board with a special shield designed by my friend Ivo Noorhoff.
The shield replaces the remote control for one or more Philips Living Color Lamps.

in this Example I’m taking the center 80×60 pixel of a webcam image an getting the average color.
I’m sending this color (if changed from the last sample) once every second to a wowza-media server app on my server that has the arduino board attached. (the server is close enough to a living colors lamp !!)
[ Now all it needs is some proper error handling.. ]

Et voila! Remote Controled Ambient lighting.

I’ll try to get a video up soon.