A Twitter Wall is a projection of short messages from a micro-blogging application, which is used for events – a “wall” with all the live tweets containing a given hashtag.

The Flickernoise video synthesis software for Milkymist allows you to set up such a “wall” on top of your VJ performance with only a few clicks.

The first step is to connect your Milkymist One video synthesizer to the internet. With most network setups, this is as simple as connecting the Ethernet cable – the device will then automatically use DHCP to configure itself. If it does not work on your particular network, click Settings on the bottom of the Flickernoise control panel, and enter the network parameters manually.

Flickernoise network settings

Then, click RSS wall in the control panel, and click Enable and OK. By default, it will search for posts containing the hashtag #milkymist on the micro-blogging service identi.ca. To change the hashtag, simply replace the part after ?q= in the URL. If you want to use Twitter instead, simply use an URL like http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=milkymist.

Twitter wall configuration

You are now done and tweets containing the hashtag will be displayed live on top of the visual performance:

Example result

To advertise the twitter wall to your guests, you can use the Idle message option, which will display regularly a fixed text in the absence of tweets.

If you are running on a LAN without internet connection, you can also use OpenSoundControl (OSC) to send the text messages. Just send a string to the OSC path /osd. The Flickernoise OSC server is listening on the UDP port 4444. So, with oscsend, you could use something like this:
oscsend 192.168.0.42 4444 /osd s Hello\ World

Point the camera at a dancer on stage, at people attending your party, at toys, use UV-glow paint… there are no limits to creativity!
If no camera setup is available, the Milkymist One can produce purely generative effects which react to the ambient sound, making it an ideal option for music bands, clubs and party organizers who want a turnkey solution for simple visual effects.

To control the Milkymist One, the possibilities are endless. The device supports inputs from MIDI keyboards, USB computer keyboards, DMX desks and OpenSoundControl (OSC) clients. You can use a smartphone with an application such as TouchOSC to interact with the visual performance wirelessly, by connecting a WiFi router to the Ethernet port. You can even tap into the immense diversity of the sensor interfaces which have been developed for the Arduino board, and use the Arduino to control the Milkymist One over MIDI.

VJ’s will appreciate the possibility to design new visual effects using the Flickernoise Patching (FNP) language, which allows you to create unique and personal shows without requiring extensive experience with computer programming. And if you do program computers, you will certainly like the fact that the complete Milkymist One design is open source.

• Download product brochure (PDF)
• Get yours. Yes, we are shipping!

The FNP language is inspired by MilkDrop, an audio visualizer for which tens of thousands of effects have been written. It allows you to create effects with a few lines of code. For example, the combination of this patch:

imagefile1=pleiades.jpg
imagefile2=pleiades.jpg
image1_a=0.4
image2_a=0.4
per_frame=image1_zoom=0.35+0.1*sin(1.21*time)+0.3*bass
per_frame=image2_zoom=0.35+0.1*sin(0.98*time)+0.3*bass
sx=0.97
sy=0.97
ob_a=1
ob_size=0.01
per_frame=cx=0.5+0.1*sin(1.82*time)
per_frame=cy=0.5+0.1*sin(0.97*time)
per_frame=rot=0.05*sin(0.4*time)
per_frame=image1_x=0.5+0.25*sin(4.32*time)
per_frame=image1_y=0.5+0.25*cos(6.14*time)
per_frame=image2_x=0.5+0.25*sin(5.17*time)
per_frame=image2_y=0.5+0.25*cos(4.47*time)

and this image:

gives the following (moving!) effects:

Of course, the Milkymist One is not just a screensaver. You can build interactive effects that respond to audio or MIDI controllers, and also process the footage from a camera in real time. Everything is done with snippets of FNP code called “patches”.

Patches can of course be shared over the internet, and the Milkymist One comes preloaded with many of them. So, don’t be afraid, you do not need to learn everything about patches to get started!

Here are other screenshots from different patches. If you like them, feel free to buy a Milkymist One!

• MIDI controllers
• USB MIDI controllers (coming very soon!)
• OSC (OpenSoundControl)
• DMX512, both input and output
• 38kHz infrared
• Arduino (via MIDI, OSC or infrared)

With microcontrollers, this can be accomplished by adding code that toggles some pin that is then used for debugging, and watching that pin with an oscilloscope. Such a pin can also serve as sophisticated trigger, e.g., to capture some input signal only when an error is detected.

With M1, we can do the same, e.g., make LM32 or Navre toggle an I/O under software control. But we can do better: we can also route “hardware” signals directly, without involving software.

Here are three ways to do this:

1. Change the Verilog to properly route the signal to the output pad. This is nice and clean but has the following disadvantages:
   • need to run the full build process for each change of taps,
   • need to edit the sources (and remember to undo all the changes once the problem is fixed),
   • the signals need to be propagated step by step up the module hierarchy (*), which means a lot of small changes in many files,

     (*) Verilog should support also direct references that “jump” the hierarchy, but this doesn’t seem to be properly implemented in the Xilinx tools.

2. The pros just edit the FPGA with a WYSIWYG editor (Part three shows how to route signals to a pad). What I don’t like about this is that it’s not script-friendly. I’d also suspect that the changes are lost or at least in danger when re-synthesizing.
3. Like above, but edit non-interactively. This is an experimental hack I’ve now implemented.

Read the rest from the Milkymist mailing list…

Updating is easy – just connect the M1 to the Internet (booting it with the Ethernet cable connected to a network with DHCP should do, or use the system settings to configure the network) and then press the first push button (labeled L) for a few seconds. It should display this:

Update in progress

Then, power off and on again your M1. The “About” dialog box will display the new versions (Flickernoise 1.0 + SoC 1.0.1):

New versions

Here’s how it’s done:

• first, you need some MIDI controller. For now, it has to be one that has the old-style MIDI connectors, not USB-MIDI. I used a Korg Kaossilator Pro.
• next, you need to define which of the controller functions you want to map to variables for your patch. This is done in the M1′s control panel, Interfaces > MIDI > Controller mapping.

  “midi1″ through “midi8″ are the variables you can set. The value on the right side is the controller number. E.g., for my Kaossilator, I assigned:
  

  midi1	12	touch pad, X axis
  midi2	13	touch pad, Y axis
  midi3	91	gate arpeggiator slider
  midi4	94	program volume knob

  This is for using the Kaossilator both as an instrument and as a MIDI controller. If I had switched it to be only a controller, I would have had more controls to play with and some of the numbers would have changed.

• you can now use Patches > Variable monitor to see how the controls affect the midi1 … midi4 variables. Each gets assigned a value between 0 to 1, corresponding to the setting of the control. (MIDI transmits values from 0 to 127.)
• finally, you need to modify a patch to use the MIDI variables. I took a simple one, “Geiss – Tornado”, and made the following tweaks:
  1. per_frame=t=time+midi2*100;

     and then changed all the wave_
     settings to use “t” instead of “time”. This way, I can modulate the color by moving along the Y axis on the pad.

  2. per_frame=rot=midi1*2;

     I put this after the last assignment to “rot”, effectively overriding it. Now rotation is entirely under my control, with no rotation when touching the pad on the left edge, and rapid spinning on the right edge.

  3. per_frame=move_x=0.5+midi3/5;

     This controls the distance of the point being drawn from the center. With rotation, this becomes the radius at which things appear. I assigned it to the slider.

  4. per_frame=zoom=0.9+midi4/5;

     This controls how quickly we “travel into” the image. I assigned it to the volume knob.

• these settings are lost when powering down or restarting the M1. To keep them, save with Performance > Save and, after booting, load with Performance > Load. Be careful to save under the directory /ssd/, not the root directory. The latter is also lost when booting.

Here is a video:

In this case, I didn’t use the Kaossilator’s sound. Also, some of the controls aren’t very nicely mapped for the effects I was trying to make. That’s why I often had a hard time getting from an all-green screen to something more interesting.