Some sexy shots

TADA!

It's done!

Man, this project took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.  I was sick all this week (after a grueling weekend of work on this), but luckily the only task at hand was to apply coats of varnish and wait for them to dry. Tonight I went in to the lab with the finished shell and put in the final 8 hours of cutting the sheet metal back plate, mounting the sensors, wiring the innards, and mounting the feet.  I am pleased with the end result.  What do you think?

The best part about today was that after I stuffed all the wires in the cavity and barely managed to secure the back plate, I found only two errors in the software that reads the sensors.  So I opened her back up and quickly resolved the issue.  Now I have a working controller.  I say this to stress the importance of prototyping.  If you ever want to build something of nontrivial complexity, prototyping is the only way to discover the 'essential' issues.  Without that knowledge, you're dead in the water because, believe me, the 'emergent' issues will be laying in wait when you go to do the final build.

Progress

A LOT of work has gone into the touchboard. From Thursday to Sunday I put in approximately 35 hours. The tasks that got done were: routing/drilling/filing/sanding/varnishing the padauk, re-wiring and heat-shrinking most of the sensor components, redesigning the circuit to accommodate more i/o than the Ardiuno has via a two 4051 multiplexer ICs, redesigning the Arduino firmware, and modifying the Max/MSP patch that receives the serial data from the Arduino. It was a weekend full of sawdust, solder, code, music, and beer. My favorite things :)

Padauk just after some drilling and routing

after first sanding

Component inventory

Comparison with prototype

2nd routing pass

Modeled with the lovely Michael Berger

with first coat of varnish applied

Building an instrument

Building your own instruments is a lot of fun, and very rewarding.  It is also a lot of work and an excellent learning experience.

I'm building a custom controller for myself as part of my 250b (HCI) project.  The vision behind the project is to have a very solid and sturdy (think heavy) interface for delicate expressive interaction.  The input is achieved with pressure and position sensitive strips mounted to the surface.  These sensors will be covered with dense foam to increase the amount of physical travel.  The motivation is to explore the effects of such materials as a form of haptic feedback for the performer.  The device will also be equipped with a rotary encoder, six LEDs, and four buttons.  In the future, it will be expanded with another pressure sensor (double the length of the others) and analog outputs for use with voltage controlled gear such as modular synthesizers.  Here are some images of the work in progress.

Modifying an FSR strip

early experiments

First prototype

Second prototype, after getting handy with a router

Piece of Padauk to be used in final rendition

And here's Tom, the fine gentleman who patiently explained all I needed to know about buying hardwood and led me to that beauty of a block (and at a great price)