Kunstautomat

DR – the Danish national radio – are moving from their old location to brand new buildings in the ”Ørestad” area. This Sunday they were selling a lot of old equipment. I would have bought one of their Studer tape decks if only I had room for it – they are all the size of a small car! Instead I bought a Lyrec RB04 – aka the Lyrec Fred. I have always thought the Danish company Lyrec (“Lyngy Recorders”) made very attractive machines. When it was new the price tag was approx. 9.000 euros. This Sunday I paid 13 euros for mine.

Labels: audio, hardware, retro

Last week I was doing a workshop at the Art Academy of Jutland. We need a simple way of controlling motors and toys from a remote webbrowser. We ran a server on an old inexpensive PC with a printerport, and I wrote a small commandline tool for switching pins on the port on and off. You can download this extremely simple program. The program is freeware and a small text file with instructions is included – but I don’t offer any support .

Labels: download, freeware, hardware, physical computing, software

Working with physical computing in Copenhagen is asking for trouble. I have been trying to get hold of the SN754410 H-bridge chip for a while. Nothing expensive or exotic: Just a 3€ chip for controlling small motors. But nobody sells them in this city.
Then I tried the web: Conrad, Acroname and robot-stores. Shipping 5 chips costs many times the price for the chips themself.
I will try to find them in Amsterdam or Linz next month.

Labels: hardware, physical computing