Curltable - development blog » Curltable

Installer will be ready in a few days

David — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:14:26 +0000

It has been a while since my last post, but I was kind of busy working for my company which will hopefully launch a new website in a few days. Anyway. Many people asked me about an installer or instructions on how to get the sources ready. I will try to provide those in a few days, so stay updated for that. Even with that in hand, I can not guarantee that the curltable will run on your touchscreen. As stated in the belonging paper it was only tested on an LG Flatron L1730SF. Speaking of the paper, a publisher contacted me some days ago and offered to publish my thesis. I just want to state again that all of this project is available open source even the thesis. Hopefully, all the people that are trying to get this project into something where money is the motivation will read this and stop writing me about there boring ideas.

So here is the link to that(again) : Paper

Also many people made comments or tried to give hints on how to improve the software. I’m still searching for advanced testers or developers with some xna experience. It would be nice to port the curltable to Mac. The XNATouch Project sounds promising but I don’t have a Mac on hand to give it a try.

cheers
Dave

Curltable V1.0 Alpha released

David — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:30:10 +0000

The first release is ready for sharing. You can find the source at Github.

Master: http://github.com/DHoffm/Curltable
Archives: Zip, TAR

If somebody needs an installer feel free to send me an email and I will see what I can do.
There is still a long way to go so be nice with your comments!

Leave your interesting and creative responses in the comment section beloooowwwww.

Mouse Trail

David — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:25:46 +0000

To improve the feedback of the turntable, especially for the plate, a bit I wrote a simple DrawableGameComponent which draw’s a mouse trail. Simply call it in your game via:

1	Cursor c = new Cursor(this);

The component will register itself. You may need to adjust the elasticity, friction and the scaling of each Trail Point in the component to fit your needs.

Download: MouseTrail 1.0
Screenshots: MouseTrail in Curltable, Standalone

In addition I setup a little multitouch device like the one from here and used the TUIO library and the TUIO C# Client to have multiple Cursors. You will need to download the CCV from the NUIGroup too.

Download: MouseTrail MultiTouch

Feel free to use it in your Game.

Use a potentiometer in XNA

David — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:13:33 +0000

During my first researches on the curltable I thought it would be nice to have some functions controlled by external elements such as potentiometers, buttons or sliders. So I gave it a try and used my Arduino and the serialPort class for communication to the board. What I tried was to control the tempo of an audio track by a potentiometer. Normally a SerialPort.readline() should be enough to get the right data from the desired Port but in this case I tried to integrate it into XNA. The problem here is that your game can either run with a fixed or a variable timestep. If you are using a variable timestep in XNA the readline method should work for you, if not it will hang because of timing issues. To get around that I used the SerialPort.ReadExisting() method instead. This one is reading the date without any timeout. Different then the readline method you need to seperate your incoming information from binary data such as ‘\n’ (newline) and ‘\r’ (carriage return) on your own. Also sometimes the information you get from this method are incorrect or incomplete. So you need to check that too. I set up a little example which can be downloaded from here.

University is paying my Thesis

David — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:51:16 +0000

For the first time the VFAI announced that the best thesis for bachelor and master students will be honored this year. The Curltable was nominated at my faculty at University of Applied Science Erfurt. Unexpectedly my thesis won and I recieved some cash which was luckily more than I payed for the printing of it. The honor took place beside this years graduate celebration. Some pictures of this event can be found here. Again, thanks to everybody who made that possible, most of them where already named in my thesis.

The Curltable

David — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:16:27 +0000

This is hopefully one of many posts about my ongoing work for the Curltable. You may ask what exactly the curltable is? Well it’s basically another approach on integrating digital music into a dj mix. There are already several other approaches out there which work fine for most people. What I tried to accomplish with this software is to simplify the mixing with digital music and to share a solution that is affordable. The complete paper on that idea can be found here. To get a first impression on it I uploaded a video, which I used during my presentation at the University of Applied Science Erfurt. You can also find some pictures of it on my flickr page.

The software is developed in XNA. To integrate audio I used the Bass Library and several add-ons. Currently I’m working hard on the optimization of the scratching mechanism and some other functionalities like looping and id3 tagging. If you have any questions or suggestions on that idea let me know.