FUTURE BLINDNESS

This weekend I made a proof-of-concept demo of the SyncWalk digital composition interface I’m working on. You can see photos on my flickr set, and a video is up on YouTube (I think Harlo may have a video of it up soon).

As you can see, it’s a little noisy right now—I’m going to add some filter capacitors and mill a PCB this coming week in an effort to ameliorate this.

At this point, I’m still not sure how I will differentiate between a palm-contact or a thumb contact, let alone contact between the two hands. (The video does not show it, but the glove has a conductive pad on the palm as well) One strategy would be to use the PWM outs to give each finger’s pad a different tone, like a DTMF pad, or to use different reference voltages for the thumb and palm contacts. Interference would be avoided if I could make a DTMF-like solution (whereas it would be the main source of noise if I had to read analog values), but I’m not sure frequency-detection is something AVRs can do well.

It’s always nice to have incremental rewards when you do a project, and this weekend has yielded encouraging results. I’m ordering conductive fabric tonight from here and will be trying to design a glove-to-cat5 PCB in the coming days. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas or suggestions!

Well, the flower project hit a snag when the dragon skin I molded turned out to be too thick for the muscle wire to move—in the course of figuring this out, I think I may have damaged/overheated some of the wire segments.

Most of the wire is undamaged, though, and it was easy to retrieve the other wires from the silicone.

Now I’m using a much thinner and lighter strategy involving a plastic flower I got at a craft shop. The downside here is that now I’ve got a shot at making a flower that magically sets itself on fire.

My new form factor also means there’s no inbuilt means to force the wire back into a bent position when it’s unactuated - I’ll have to work out something there once the silicone has cured. It won’t be pretty.

The other bad part: so far, I have not got a circuit working - I initially ordered too few/the wrong parts. Now I’m using a relay from an old robotics project of my brother’s, but I’m concerned about the current drawn by each wire—to get them to react quickly you have to really juice them up, and I doubt my relay can handle the current drawn by 6 of these, not to mention where I’ll find a power source for all this.

The circuit I’ll worry about tomorrow. Tonight I’m not sleeping until I’m confident at least the form factor is correct and workable.

Friend, I’m making progress on this project. You can always check the flickr set here for the latest images.

Progress-wise, here’s what I’ve got left to do:

• Decide on the actual material to use for the final flower
• Figure out how the muscle wire will connect on either end, and where this will be - it seems now that molding my own silicone petals will not be feasible in my timeframe.
• Design the circuit - I have a photoresistor that would be easy to hook up to a small transistor circuit, but I’m not sure this’ll yield consistent results. Also, there’s a latching problem that I might want to try and solve with a timer.