So it’s been about a year since this blog was updated, so we’re bouncing back into the blogoverse with an epic post to make up for the hiatus. The Bigger Design presents you with our Sentinel project. We strapped a NERF BFG on a homebrew swivel stand, hooked up some wires with an Arduino board, slapped a webcam on top, and brought it all together with an Adobe AIR application to make it sing.

This was part of a larger presentation given at this past spring’s Columbia Adobe User Group / Refresh Columbia double-feature meetup. Here’s another short video demonstration of the Sentinel from the meeting, courtesy of Greg Lunn.

Now we’re brushing off the cobwebs and bringing the Sentinel project back into the spotlight. Over the next few weeks, we’ll break the project down, describe its biggest challenges and how we solved them. If there’s enough interest, we’ll get your trigger finger itching with details on how you can roll your own.

Check out our Sentinel photos on Flickr.

Blackmagic Design’s Intensity card is cheap, easy to use, and mighty powerful. You can preview video in After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, etc. all using this card’s HDMI out. In Photoshop send a still to the monitor and preview it live there. Paint a little bit, export again, and see the change.  It also has HDMI in so you can capture uncompressed HD from a HDV camera like the Canon HV20. It’s pretty slick. That is, when it’s compatible with your software. After installing the CS4 Master Collection this little nugget reared its head when sending video out to my HD monitor.

An email to BMD support yielded this response:

"We are waiting for one last thing from Adobe to be sorted and then we should
be able to finalize our CS4 drivers. I’ve heard that this hopefully will
happen soon and then once we get that last issue ironed out the CS4 drivers
should be released. No timeframe for when that will happen but hopefully
soon."

So now I’m high and dry until Adobe gets itself in gear. Or I could fork out the cash for Final Cut Studio.

UPDATE: BMD just released the drivers for Windows. What about your Mac customers?