During my last workshop at iMAL (actually it was also the first one) I was lucky to meet a lot of interesting people. We were making music instruments out of Arduino … but his post is not about how much fun we had playing electronic instruments on the streets of Brussels :-)

performing in Brussels, copyright (c) 2008 by Accrochages

Among others I found a couple of young Quebec artists (on the next picture). Skilled as they are with electronics and AVR coding, they spend quite a lot of time crafting the electronics to shape their needs within the field of installation art and public interventions. Sofian Audry and Samuel St-Aubin have been artists in residence at iMAL for one month; during that period they have created several interesting pieces.

picture CC 3.0 SA by Cuartielles

They also produce small tools that can benefit many of us during our work. The one giving the title to this post, the poorman´s oscilloscope is one of my favorites. It is a combo putting together a Processing sketch and an Arduino program to plot the values from an analog port to the screen. Simple and pretty.

poorman´s oscilloscope, copyright (c) 2008 by Accrochages

On the other hand, during the workshop, they also produced “Glade […] a free software audio library for Arduino (for use with Atmega8 and Atmega168 chips). The library provides basic functions for 8-bit audio playback using PWM, together with a digital audio processing library inspired from softwares such as PureData and ChucK“. Personally I love the idea of using 8-bit sound filters on top of my own stereo sound sequencer.