Goal: Complete Hardware and establish Wireless.

Hardware:

A great majority of dance movement derives from the orientation and manipulation of the feet. So a comfortable wearable device need to be sturdy enough to hold electronics and not jerk about with sudden movements, but also need to be easily put on and taken off as well as not ungainly and perturbing for the wearer. Shinguards are a publically common and convenient hardware starting point. Simply drilling into the hard plastic and attaching needed circuitry did the trick.

Success: Fabricated both Accelerometer mounted Shinguards.

Finished establishing Force sensitive resistors (FSR) in shoes. One for each ball and heel of foot. Ingredients: wire, conductive fabric and tape.

Modified perf-board to include voltage divider for FSR’s, external 9-volt battery, 5 volt regulator, and female header pins for MMA7361L three-axis analog Accelerometer and Wixel radio module. Later, a small hall effect sensor was added for performance purposes.

Wireless:

Serial communication via Arduino Pro Mini and wixels is too slow and cumbersome. Original plan: Use two transmitting Wixels to send messages to host computer. each message had a defined start character to identify which leg it came from, then would preceed with analog values sent in char range from 0 – 255 and end with defined end character. Problems with first approach: Both wixels would attempt to contact the host computer and end up mixing their messages. Sometimes analog sensor values were confused with start characters that had the same char.

Since host receiver could read two signals at once, The second attempts focused on pinging each wixel leg indenpently to trigger call back data to be transmit. Problem with this method was timing. The serial Interface in max needed to be bang for each character read, then immediately trigger a call back for the other leg’s wixels. Sometime the timing between sending the trigger signal and immediately reading the call back were off and the communication became fault.

Solution. The Wixels have a built in ADC RX & TX firmware. This Firmware allowed for sending straight analog values with packets for up to 6 analog pins on the Wixel. These 55-character packets would have a Wixel ID, a timer count since turn on, and 6 analog values in milli-volts!!!

That equates to sensitivity of 0 -3300 for each accelerometer and FRS read. The Receiving Wixel receives these packets through the Serial object in Max, routes them based on Wixel ID and unpacks their values to get the data.

A simple modification of the Perf boards allowed for the solution to be implemented. The ADC communication is much fast then Arduino Serial and has far less complication. Typical reading speed is in 40ms intervals for each packet.

Before:

After:

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.

Implementation 

Slightly before the due of Milestone 3, I finished to archive 2 goals : to make changeable form and bring more participatory listening interactions.

I have used many parts and technologies for making this like below list.

Hardware :

RN-52 Bluetooth audio module, Arduino pro mini 5v, Thumb Joystick, Transducer

Software :

Pure data with call response, time scratching and audio effects functions with a Arduino scratch

Physical shape :

3D printing with PLA (Based on Socket and joint structure)

In this project, I wanted to bring an unusual device to give a sign to user like that ‘hey, you will have an unexpected situation. please, be ready like in Disneyland’ as SETTING. And then, I mapped joystick and Surface Transducer together, so when people want to hear something with this device, their hands are naturally positioned for controlling a joystick and they will hear customized sound without training because its controlling system is intuitive and easy to use and it provides true feedbacks as EASY MAPPING and FEEDBACK. I just hope that these things should work together and be vivid experience to users totally, but here are many questions.

Future plan

First of all, I like to make an more attractive and wearable physical form, make a small size add more music applications such as adding one more beat layer automatically.

Ideasthesia_installation view

Ideasthesia_installation view

Ideasthesia_installation view

Model Making

I have begun to create models. The current models utilize additive methods: one with plaster printing (thanks to dFab) and PLA printing with a Makerbot in Codelab. I also utilized the Art Fab CNC to make a slightly larger rolly polly. Some of the below models are shown with the original object that I used for the capture.

More…

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.

ideasthesia installation view from JaeWook Lee on Vimeo.

to make a shape and circuit

After making the connection of bluetooth, I have worked to make a shape and circuit. For building the shape, I have to decide how to hold and change between a headphone and speaker shape because my previous shape has a potential to be changeable, but it’s not enough to hold a headphone unit without a support. However, one labmate gave a hint to use a joint and socket structure and I did it with Makerbot 3D printer.

And, then I made a quick and dirty shape not for final first because I have to wait some parts from Sparkfun for making the final circuit and I wanted to test and measure how I can deploy parts into the shape.

Until, now, I have a serious problem about unstable datas from analog sensors because the circuit structure requires a little complexity and I don’t have enough experience. So, probably, in this week, before making final version, I have to make sure this issue.

Appendix.

I have tried many types of sensors as the input part such with a Potentiometer and joystick and touch pad. During this process, what I found is that every sensors bring different situations and responses from users. For example, Joy stick causes more an active interaction than others and touch pad seems more like a play and stop button although both have much more freedom than a potentiometer.