Two linked turn-tables, one playing vinyl cut to force the needle to hop, the other equipped with a pen mirroring these movements, drawing a seismogram.
Category Archives: projects
Sondol
An attempt to replicate Alvin Lucier’s Sondols used in his piece Vesper
sololala
Concert series curated by Gregor Hotz with 5 evenings juxtaposing the “Empress of Sounds” against “The Man with the Horn”. Or music by Alvin Lucier interpreted by women vs. saxophone soli played by men. The Lucier pieces were mostly realized with digital technology. In particular “Music for Solo Performer” was interpreted using a multi-channel alpha wave sensor and a periodicity detector implemented in MaxMSP.
Reflow hooray!
With a few dozen boards to be manufactured and given the limited time frame, I decided to try my luck with an own reflow oven. I went for PCB-Pool‘s approach that combines their PCB and stencil production services with a set of reflow tools for you to do the rest, i.e. baking the boards.
Applying the solder paste thru the stencil went really smooth and fast, while placing the components still took quite some time (but that was to be expected). The reflow itself was done in a few minutes and largely succesful, with just a few shorts across some pins of the one TSSOP chip with its 0.5mm pitch.
Looking forward to do more of this!
Industrial design collaboration
With the first two prototypes completed, we had to consider options on how to proceed towards the final product. While we could have strapped off-the-shelf boxes to an ordinary glove, something more elegant was desired, so the call went out for an industrial designer.
Here we found designer duo Christophe Vaillant and Ruth Weber, who were given the task of designing a glove with compartments to hold all the electronics, as well as a carrier for the sensors to be fixed to the fingers. Here’s a pic of an intermediate version:
Working with them was inspiring, also because we’re both into “desktop manufacturing”. E.g. for the sensor carriers they built their own deep drawing machine powered by a hoover:
(The pictures are theirs)
Second prototype
Second prototype, now complete with DC-DC converter and OpAmps for GSR and the optical pulse signal. The board matches the size of the Lantronix Matchport.
Optical heart rate sensor
Most mobile heart rate systems take their measurements from a simplified EKG circuit mounted on a breast belt. As it will be too cumbersome to ask museum visitors to don this, we decided to go for an optical sensor that clips onto a finger.
In there, the pulsing blood flow changes the amount of IR light that is reflected back to the photo transistor. The disadvantage is that this type of measurement is much more sensitive, in particular when the sensor moves against the skin.
First GSR prototype
Decided to base the sensor system on Cypress’ PSoC architecture to explore the possibilities regarding its configurable analog subsystem. For now I’m using it to control the gain of the second stage GSR amplification.
Regarding wireless transmission we settled on WLAN and chose a Matchport module from Lantronix.
The cables you see in the picture clip onto standard electrodes.
Visit to gfai
Went out to Adlershof with Jens today to visit gfai, the “Gesellschaft zur Förderung angewandter Informatik e.V.”, where the acoustic camera is being developed, and generously provided for the duration of this project.
In the background you can see the circular microphone array that feeds the analysis system. On the table there’s my ultrasound generator connected to the back of a cardboard speaker box.
Wormhole Dordrecht
An iPhone application that links your location to a set of sounds.