Went to the laser cutter this morning to make a couple of stencils ready for the paint and circuit board to arrive. I made this stencil to the size of circuit board stated on the website, though very quickly found that the connecting 'wires' were far two wide apart.
The application of the paint was interesting... It's very gloopy and didn't agree with the stencils, creating a quality of line that is something I want to avoid at all costs! The finished wall piece will definitely use vinyl as the stencil, in order to get the cleanest line possible.
Anyway, though there were errors in alignment, four of the keys connected up so I could play sounds! It's a magical kind of thing to touch ink on paper and an electrical sound appears... this is definitely on the right track.
Finally, I used the included stencil to get the right set of lines and then painted a makeshift keyboard extending from this. Amazingly, the longest line to the bottom of the image still conducts the sound, as does the A.
From here I began playing with Arduino, the software that allows you to mess around with MIDI - the system that controls how the board processes sound. This also required some 'cold soldering' of the circuit board - basically just joining different bits on the board together with a dot of the paint.
Arduino makes it quite easy to manipulate the sound and pick different instruments - I want to go with the instrument that brings the biggest smile to people's faces. When it comes down to it, the end result of this project should be to make people happy and connected.
No comments:
Post a Comment