40cd531f95e019890b0203a85104cfa5 cuecat_sc.tar.gz
A few years ago a company called Digital Convergence Inc. released a barcode reader called the :CueCat™. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that the output of this device could be easily decoded (see here or here),ushering in countless homegrown applications for the device.
I like a few of my peers picked up one of the PS/2 :CueCats™ from a local Radio Shack for free. Admittedly, my :CueCat™ never made it far outside of it’s plastic wrapper. It seemed like a cool thing at the time, but I never really came up with anything to use it for. It was eventually lost in one of my apartment to apartment moves.
I’ve been thinking about ways to make laptop music performances more interesting to watch. One of the ideas I came up with was to associate different parts of a song to different cards of some kind of deck. For instance a bass line would be associated to the Death card, a drum beat associated with the Fool, and so on. The arrangement of the song could then be determined by grouping certain cards into hands. I came up with the idea when I’d read about Semacode on Slashdot. I thought that it would be cool to use cards with 2-D barcodes for the sequences. Then I could scan the cards with a camera and get them into my music software.
At the time I read the article, Semacode was only available for camera phones. Since, I didn’t have a camera phone the idea soon withered.
At least it withered until one day, when the word barcode connected in my mind with the word :CueCat™. It was at that point that I realized that it might not be so impossible to write an application that would turn :CueCat™ output into SuperCollider input. Then began my search for a :CueCat™, so that I could try out this idea. It took about five minutes to realize that there about a million of them for sale on eBay. I ended up buying a “new” USB model from Surplus Computers after checking to see whether any of my friends had some stashed in their closets somewhere.
How exactly watching someone play some kind of solitaire variation might be more or less interesting than watching someone play with a laptop I can’t really say. At least now I have the code to try it out with.
I found out while writing this that there’s been a Linux binary of the Semacode application made available. This might make the 2-D barcode idea possible at some later time.