Anya Yermakova

HOW TO MAKE (ALMOST) ANYTHING
MIT MEDIA LAB

INTERFACE AND APP PROGRAMMING - week13

I decided to play with capacitive sensing, requiring me first to make the board. Unfortunately this had so many issues that I barely got to the actual interface part.

Board Design

Some things I am not sure in the end I did correctly:

//is the 10M resistor supposed to be between the send pad and pin or between send pad and sense pad? If the latter, how would I be able to connect the other sense pad?
//This tutorial suggested wiring a capacitor to ground on the trace that sends the sense signal to the Attiny. However, the fact that my readings were intersepted with zero's - could this mean that the capacitors were actually screwing something up?

Download brd,sch,traces

Here is a sample of the readings:

video 1

Here is another version of the attempt, where I am just touching the wire and the reading is maxing out. Not really sure I understand what's going on here.

video 2




Processing
I didn't actually get very far with Processing. But I figured out how the serial port knows that the values are coming from Arduino (see below).

Readings simple visualization in Processing from Anya Yermakova on Vimeo.

Other Input things I tried

I also played this week with the MPU-6050 accelerometer+gyroscope breakout board from Sparkfun, hoping to use it in the final project for sensing acceleration and angular momentum of a moving body. Had lots of trouble with compiling, and finally got numbers out of the serial port, but unfortunately all zeros, so there was no point going to Processing. Help would be welcomed.

Final Project update

This is the ideal scenario. I am more than aware that it will need some simplification.

   //Tetrahedron completed from Make Something Big week

   //2 dancers in it

   //the dancers wearing 2 breath belts each, one for upper chest one for lower chest

   //pre-recorded sounds of breath used as output, speaker from computer

   //the dancers wearing and IMU, which is generating a visual score with Processing

   //score is displayed for a live musician to interpret, keeping the breath belt output as the bpm indication

   //the information from IMU is also used to trigger (speed, locale) piezo disks, making clicks, embedded into the tetrahedra.

   //dancers are covered in "touchpad-like" capacitive sensors - vinyl cut additions to their costume.

   //the information from the capacitors is transferred to an LED array which covers some part of the tetrahedra.