The Spatianator – Description

The Spatianator is a network of (currently) three semi-autonomous robots called crickets that, along with input from human “performers”, collaboratively explore and enhance the behavior of a space. The Spatianator performs a probabilistic composition that is managed by a central controller, which supervises the actions of the crickets through a state machine where each cricket is in one of three possible states at any given time:

1. Recording mode
2. Playback mode
3. Perform mode

The performers (anyone present in the space with the Spatianator) are encouraged to interact with the crickets. The crickets record sounds that are occurring in the room and pass them around to one another, to the point where the room’s filter (behavior in the presence of excitation) becomes exaggerated. The composition aims to enhance the performer’s experience of resonant properties of the space they are in. Below is an example of some of the sounds created during the CFA exhibition last week.

The Spatianator – Acknowledgements

We would like to specially thank Ali Momeni for his guidance over the course of the semester, and for the privilege of being able to work in the ArtFab.

Spatianator (v1.0) week 3 progress

In this video we demonstrate a beta version of a single “cricket”. The cricket has four actuators, which we talk about individually. Finally, we demonstrate sounds that we can achieve and plans for the next week of development.

Milestone 1,2 Goals:

Milestone 1: Explore different types of actuators, and the sounds they can produce in different spaces. Determine how we can enhance these sounds in Pure Data.

Milestone 2: Make CAD models for crickets, build proof-of-concepts, and order any additional parts we might need.

Milestone 2 Progress:

The implementation of our milestone 2 goals was carried out in two separate areas. The first involved creating a box that could hold the components necessary for a cricket, and the second part was getting the Udoo to talk to a single actuator. Each of these items are described in detail below, and progress photos are also listed throughout the rest of this post.

Hardware Design of Crickets:
We decided to make a laser cut box to hold all our electronics, and to support the ‘goose-necks’ we plan to use to position and hold the actuators in place along with providing us flexibility. This box is now designed and we have a 2nd prototype of it- there are three compartments: The 1st compartment holds the Udoo, the 2nd houses the 50W x 2 Audio Amp and the 3rd holds the battery and the power/driving circuitry.

The box is strong enough to hold the weight of the goose-necks and the actuators. All sides are ‘interlocking’ except for one. This side allows service of inner electronics, as required.

The top and bottom of the box are cut with a thicker sheet of Masonite, as these would support the box or the actuators. So the plan is to allow this box to be attached to any 1/4 inch 20 bolt holder (like all tripods) so it can attach to whatever support we want. To distribute the weight, we will thread a 1/4 inch 20 into a metal sheer (similar to the template you can see in the diagram) and cut it so as to bind it to the lower side of the box. The top of the box already has space for attaching 4 actuators, as the four holed allow 4 goose-necks to be attached- we wouldn’t use more than 2 for now.

All the hardware required (screws, bolts, nuts) have been ordered.

Udoo, actuators
Our initial tests with the actuators used simple transistors connected directly to a DC power supply. This week we were able to connect a striker to the Udoo, and control it using a simple PureData software interface to the Udoo’s GPIOs.

Specifically, our striker actuator is connected to a DRV8835 dual motor driver, which uses logical power from the Udoo, and motor power from a battery back. We’ll need two of these motor drivers for each cricket, each of which will control four actuators.

The video below shows our basic setup. The next step is to make the circuitry more robust and portable, so that we can quickly scale to more actuators in week 3.

We have improved on the existing Suspended Motion project by incorporating our eight channel setup. Images from this new setup can be seen below. We are also still in the process of finding a chair that optimizes the experience. Many of the chairs we have tried are noisy or do not spin as freely as we would like. A complete description of the Suspended Motion setup and experience can be found here: teach.alimomeni.net/2013fall2/?p=2559.

Localization Sensitivity Experiment

This experiment involves using the eight speaker setup to test our hearing sensitivity. We start with slow impulses rotating around the circle, and these impulses gradually accelerate until it’s difficult to distinguish which direction the sound is coming from at any given instance.

In Sonic Sculptures, the user is immersed in a sound environment that they quickly discover they can manipulate with their gestures. They learn to interact with the environment to make a new composition, or they can sit and listen to their environment objectively. We’re currently using iPhone gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass data, and are also looking into using kinect data.

 

Implementing a STABLE and ROBUST system for practical use:

In both of our setups, we have tried to make our system robust enough to take out on the road! We’ve made acrylic enclosures for all the speakers, as well as designed an acrylic amplifier box which houses an amplifier array along with a charging circuit and a Li-ion battery. The battery powered amp-box gives us the mobility we’d like to make use of later. All wiring and circuits have been shifted from the breadboard to stripboard/veroboard and everything has been kept modular to allow quick assemble/dis-assembly. For the disk setup, all hardware is mounted onto a flat wooden surface as shown in the pictures above. Finally, shielded speaker wires were used to avoid any cross-talk.

 

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