Well not really disposable maybe but I've been dreaming and looking for a <$50 projector for a while now, something I can use when the projecotor is at great risk of damage or theft.   (and small battery powerd would be cool too)
Quality of course is assumed to be at an absolute minimum.

I've been watching the zoom box since it's got the dvd player built in, but it's still priced too high. 

My best option I thought was to hack together a Opque projector and a portable flash drive, portable DVD player with a screen, or a old PDA or digital camera that can play video.  But the price has been a little over my $50 target and the work to get it to work right and dependably is enogh to make me wait untill I really need it.

But today I spoted the Senario AL-100 Mega Vu Torpedo 6ft Video Projector at buy.com for $70 which is still over my target, but the closest I've seen.  Crappy quality, and you will still need a video out device which would bring the cost up to $95.  But it's pretty cheap, and could be run off battery fairly easily.

I'd pull out an old digital camera to feed it images, (I have two semi-broken cannons that can play video, though I can't figure out how to encode a video that they will accept, so I'd have to shoot it off screen) or pick up one of these Coby DVD-209 Ultra Compact DVD Player.

But if $95 is still too much my old plan was to try something like a couple of these hooked together.
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One thing I’ve been trying to work out is how to turn the sound on and off.  For testing purposes, I’ve been using a footswitch that I step on whenever I start drawing.  As I’ve been making larger drawings, the ropes have pulled the footswitch away from me. 

Originally, I was planning to use a piezo-based contact mic mounted to the drawing surface to pick up the sound of the drawing tool, but my initial experiments with this technique did not yield good results.  Although techniques I found for interfacing a piezo element with Arduino don’t include an amplifier, I have a feeling it will be necessary to boost the signal coming out of the piezo.  I tried several piezo elements I had laying around — including a known good one, but I couldn’t get reliable data from it.

Hal suggested in his response to my post the other day that I might want to consider a pressure sensor, so today I’ve been prototyping a drawing tool holder which uses a force sensistive resistor to determine how hard I’m pressing the drawing tool against the drawing surface.

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BUST magazine Red Fly/Blue Bottle: Crazy Creepy Cool

This week I have focused on building the software which synthesizes audio. The software I used last year was very rudimentary; it could only map the position and direction of the pulleys’ movements onto audio file playback position and volume.

What I’ve been trying to do at the beginning of this residency is get the software to a point where I feel it has adequate expressive capabilities so that I can begin to try out the different mappings — and do more drawings.

At the beginning of this week, I worked towards mapping the existing data from the pulleys onto several different parameters in the Reason software synthesis environment. As I wrote earlier, there just wasn’t enough variety in the sounds I was generating to hold my interest.

To find another way to move forward, I turned my attention to the data — and came up with a number of ways to derive dynamic values from my existing sensing system.

Properties of Lines

Instead of simply treating the coordinates I receive from the sensors as changes in position, I could begin to record data about the emerging line — and its relationship to previously drawn lines.

• Current line length – since I know how far the pen has moved horizontally and vertically, I know the distance it has travelled.

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Last night, after integrating the code I worked on during the day, I made another drawing.

Here are some video samples showing how it is currently working.  Both examples are taken from the full length drawing session, in which I used a Max/MSP patch to control audio synthesis in Reason.  The overall magnitude of the gestures I make controls the volume of the sound and the separate horizonal and vertical magnitude of the gestures controls filtering parameters.

I’m trying to understand the correlation between the drawing tool and the sound it makes (both in terms of texture and value). This drawing tool is a stick of hard graphite. I chose a airy sound which augments the natural sound of the tool on the drawing surface.
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Today was the first day of my artistic residency at the Digital Performance Institute. This morning, I cut the bracket pieces in the shop at DeBaun Auditorium, and then Kelly and I came into the city to buy the lumber I needed to make my drawing surface.

After an incident (!!!) involving the mirror in the lobby, I loaded my materials and the rope&pulley equipment into the space.

After dinner, I came back to assemble the drawing surface. Construction went smoothly, but I wish I had brought my carpenter’s square and level. I improvised using my digital caliper and hacked together a plumb bob with one of my wrenches so I could level out the support poles.
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New York Times Loss Across Generations and Within a Moment

thirteen.org Red Fly/Blue Bottle—Genre Buster

RED FLY/BLUE BOTTLE
PERFORMANCE:
HERE Arts Center (145 6th ave)
$20
April 6 - May 2
9PM Wen - Sat
4PM & 7PM Sunday April 12,19
7PM Monday April 20,27
4PM Sunday April 26

As I’ve been preparing for my residency at DPI I’ve been investigating alternative ways to produce sonic drawings.  Several weeks ago, I saw (again) demonstration videos from Johnny Chung Lee’s Wiimote Projects and began thinking about whether my rope&pulley system was the ideal input for the audio drawings I’m going to be working on.  I envision drawing on a surface with “traditional” drawing tools (graphite sticks, maybe chalk, or markers) and mapping those large drawing gestures in realtime to audio in order to create sonic marks.  The infrared LED pens desribed by Lee could be used as a starting point for a sleeve which I could put around my drawing tools.  Although this departs from the rugged physicality of the rope&pulley, I think it will make the drawing process more intuitive.  

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a Wiimote.  While it was fairly straightforward to get the Wiimote connected to my PC and run some of the demo programs, I’m going to be writing my software in Max/MSP/Jitter, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to transform the coordinates I get back from the camera in the Wiimote into coordinates on a rectangular screen.  I don’t think I’ll be projecting any visuals from my computer, but I want to resolve the pen position onto a regular rectangle so I can create a mapping to the sound generation component of my software.
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