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Mic test… 1, 2, 1, 2

Saturday, March 22, 2008

The past few days have been spent hunkered over a table in the pComp lab, trying to find a way to get the simple sound monitor prototype up and running — and I think I’m finally there. Or, at least, I’ve got a start. I’ve ordered some new parts, which I have to try out and mess around with, mostly mics. All mics, as it turns out, were not created equal.

I started with ye olde Radioshack PC Board condenser mic:

And eventually (mostly due to the pre-soldiered-ness and a slightly more attentive range) ended up with this guy, another Radioshack electet:

I was lucky enough to have some suggestions to check out the ITP Sensor Wiki, and found some fantastic schematics from SoYoung Park and code from Jeff Gray (thanks!!), which after some tweaking and testing brought me to this:

This is a Processing app that watches the incoming analog values from the Arduino (in this case, the audio signal), and outputs the points on the screen, moving from left to right. The red dots are the actual values, and the line is the average. For my purposes, this works splendidly, as mics output both positive and negative voltage — so in this case, with the signal coming out of the mic boosted 2.5v, watching for the average gets a really good picture of what’s going on.

(Continued)

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Geek Entertainment TV!

Friday, March 21, 2008

So the ETech video coverage is starting to roll in, mostly talking about the brilliant discussions and presentations made by the likes of  Yahoo!, Stamen, Matt Webb, Monochrom, the Make folks, etc. So, imagine our surprise when we saw THIS:

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Hey! It’s us! And the live-action Socialbomb game at the ETech ArtFest!

Read way more on the Geek Entertainment TV post.

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Spring Break

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

…and the prototyping continues.  Given that I managed to scamper off to San Diego for a week and am woefully behind where my work plan says I should be, I’m spending this week in the lab —I really want to get a proper audio circuit set up.

Right now I’m working on getting some mic circuits together, testing them out in semi-public, and conning other people into testing them.

Updates to follow as things work.  Or don’t.

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Notes on assembling someone else’s kit

Sunday, March 16, 2008

It’s fun in my thesis that I get to assemble other people’s kits, evaluate them for usability, and then abuse the final product for my own methods.

(Note to self: find job in R&D in near future.)

I started by ordering a pile of kits from the folks at Anykits — they have outstanding prices and a website that’s actually easily searchable (though, being located in India, their shipping is a bit pricey). They have a tiny board for nearly every application (amplifiers, switches, light solutions, sensors, etc.) and they aim to educate people while giving them a decent product.

Clearly aimed at hobbyists, the kits include all the parts, a printed circuit board, and a printed schematic with the layout and a a part list. It’s pretty easy to figure out what goes where and in what direction as long as you understand the mega-basics of components (and if you don’t Wikipedia will get you up and running quickly).

(Continued)

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Sound sensor Processing app

Thursday, March 13, 2008

So while I’m getting the circuit worked out for the initial sound-sensing object for my thesis, I made a quickie Processing app that displays most of what I want the sound sensor to show. Right now, it just fades slowly when it’s clicked (showing how it would react if it picked up sounds), which sounds stupid-basic, but I’ve learned a lot about people’s reactions just testing out this so far.

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Source code: fading_screen_red

Built with Processing

Click to try it!

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New Socialbomb units!

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

So while I’ve bantered about the process of making the new SB 2.0 units and the things we’ve done with them, I haven’t given many nice images of them. So, let’s fix that:

Yay pretty pictures! The Documentation Station recently put up on the floor at ITP (a nice camera, a great lightbox, some spare lights and a nice backdrop) make for fast and easy documenting. While we’re on the subject, I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything animated about the SB’s, here’s a short video of them all blinking away:



Socialbomb units in action from Mike Dory on Vimeo.

When we programmed the new Socialbomb units, we designed them to talk to each other and share their scores. What we didn’t realize is that they’d all sync up their transmissions. The result looks extreeeeemly creepy.

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Project idea: iChat icon wearable

Monday, March 10, 2008

So I was watching all these people run around the floor at ETech, and it was really fun to watch their interactions from a distance.  Sometimes people were really excited to talk and share, sometimes they hid behind their laptops but seemed eager to start a conversation, and sometimes they busily ran from place to place.  The issue, of course, is that the people who are in the space designated for talking weren’t always eager to do so, and the people who were off to the sidelines might well have been super-happy to start up.

With this in mind, I want to make a wearable that emulates (in both look and function) an iChat/AIM/Gtalk/whatever icon.  It would have a very simple user interface: are you busy or available?  If it’s the former, your icon turns red and people will know not to talk to you.  If it’s the latter, your icon is green and you will be welcoming conversation.

Idle may be a bit different here than usual, but I think there’s a way to solve it: put a small mic in the unit.  When you’ve been available for a while but not talking to people, you’ll be viewed as “idle” and your icon will turn yellow-orange (as it does in most chat programs as well).  I’m still figuring out if, for both circuit complexity and logistics, it makes makes more sense to have an accelerometer to detect when you’re moving, but then again you don’t always move a lot when you’re having a conversation.  Have to do a bit more research before I get that ironed out.

The deeper issue is the same as the one that affects online chat ettiquite — some people say they’re away when they’re not, and others say they’re available when they don’t actually want to talk.  As of yet, I don’t have the best solution for that, but I think studying actual chatters may fix that up a bit.  It either involves a more complicated set of options for the user (and we all know that unnecessary complications are a very bad idea)

The next stage for these might be to include (you were waiting for this, weren’t you?) an XBee radio so that units can talk back and forth, letting users set a “busy but not really” status that shows them as red, but your unit would turn them green.  It would also help to solve the back-from-idle issue.  Maybe.  It’s something to consider, anyway.

(This is so, so not helping my thesis, is it?)

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BONK!

Monday, March 10, 2008

I’ve been sorta-kinda testing my peak-finding code in Processing (in Eclipse), which serves as the basis of my thesis idea: that detecting the sounds that cross the pre-set threshold and causing a change in the color of an object will be useful in personal and public health and life monitoring.

(That’s the short, simplified, mostly garbage explanation, anyway.)

And, of course, I’ve gone back to my usual method of bypassing Java and going straight to Max/MSP and Arduino to do the work for me. And, as usual, Tom Igoe has done a circuit to look for peaks in audio, and there’s a Max object to help detect spikes. The latter, called the Bonk~ object in Max (because all Max objects have to have cute names), works surpringly well. The help patch:

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and it happily outputs all the useful info:

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So I’m'a hash out a quick prototype of this to show in class, along with the physical circuit.  It’s nice to be able to whip up quickie mockups of things, though I should probably get better about doing so in “respectable” programming languages.

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Volumen

Sunday, March 9, 2008

So here I am, back from ETech in San Diego, and facing my thesis again. The good news is that I had some fantastically inspiring talks and learned a ton about people doing wonderful things in similar spaces to my thesis, most notably the OpenSpime folks, Tod Kurt’s fabulous BlinkM’s and a pile of other people hacking excellent things.  I’ll be detailing that in the very near future, as I’m still organizing my photos and in need of a decent ETech writeup.

Of course, while it’s good to know other people are doing similar work, it was scary to see this:

(Spotted on MAKE’s blog)

Clearly, this is going for over-the-top-ism while mine goes for the ambient approach, but I have to say I LOVE this project. The official site has even more documentation and explanation.

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Nerds with bombs

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

(Photo swiped from Scott again)

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