Recently, the museum where my girlfriend works, had a vernisssage for their new exhibition, that deals with the ego. They wanted the visitors to present themselves and their ego on photos in return for free drinks. Cool.

I built a small app in Processing, and linked it to the Last.fm Lovebutton from an earlier project. Used a small vbs script (Windows only) and then we had a small application that takes a screen dump, saves it to a folder and automatically prints it, when the user presses a button.

Although I would rather use real full resolution images, this quick workaround worked pretty good with the photo printer we had available.

Some time ago, I was lucky enough to get some help with building the wonderful button shown above.

The button consist of an Arduino Mini, a button from an arcade joystick and wood and plexi-glass, to give it a nice finish.

But what does it do, you might ask? Let me tell you: You hook it up to your computer with a regular USB-cable, and run a little piece of software, that speaks with the last.fm webservice via its Java API. Now, whenever you press it, the button will tell last.fm that you love the track you are currently listening to, and scrobbling via the last.fm scrobbler – program that uploads what you are listening to, on the internet.

So, yeah, a small project that’s fun to do and gives you a small dedicated physical interface that you can easily modify to do other things, than talk to last.fm, should you wish.

I am collecting my loved tracks on my personal page – esbenhardenberg.dk – look under Social.

A big thank you to everyone who helped me out with this!