WIMSI alpha set upSo I’ve created the first version of WIMSI, my Web Interactive Movement and Sound Installation.  The page with the live stream and the info is located at mendellee.com/wimsi/

I put some thought into what i wanted to do as an initial alpha test and decided that I have too much on my plate right now to try to mess with my original idea using Musclewire/Flexinol, so opted to do something that i could set up in 5 minutes instead.  Currently, turning on WIMSI does the following:

a) Turns on a light

b) Turns on a fan that’s supposed to (but currently fails to) set off some wind chimes

c) Turns on a cassette deck that plays whatever cassette i decide to put in there at the time, identified by the placard on the video stream.  The first one is a cassette tape that happened to be in the deck when i bought it at WalMart (even though i bought it “new”) which is interestingly enough some record of a woman doing some piano and voice lessons of some sort.  It’s a pretty fantastic tape, and i almost don’t want to switch to anything else.

I toyed with the idea of making the background TIX clock also a part of the setup, but opted instead to have that be powered independently so that it can show the correct time and create at least some visual interest while WIMSI is turned off.

It’s unfortunate that IFTTT functionality currently makes it so that if someone tries to activate it remotely they have to wait up to 15 minutes before it actually turns on.  I also don’t have a good way to turn it off automatically after a preset amount of time (i could turn it off instantly, but it’s so brief that it defeats the purpose), so i’m probably going to do some manual manipulating if i ever get a wemo email, but i’m okay with that for the moment.

it’s incredibly crude, but it’s a start.  Feel free to toy with it any time.  send me an email or a comment with any feedback or issues.

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