Between being in Japan and moving in to a new place and out of my old apartment, I haven’t had many updates. I’ve been making progress at the GoMA (Garage of Modern Art — what we call Jesse’s garage).

Construction of the final case has started –

I’ll be painting the interior walls a dark color so that you see it through the lexan’s clear material — hoping to get a sleek look.

Since being back, I’ve reconsidered the main sensor I’ll use to capture the wind. Until now, I had been working with an accelerometer with a rotating fan-like construction to spin in the wind. While it’s neat that I was able to create a free rotating circuit and use it with an accelerometer, it lost some of the “wind chime” feeling I originally described. When someone referred to it as a windmill, I knew the rotating idea wasn’t the right fit. It might still make it in as a secondary input, but right now I’m putting my focus on a much simpler way to catch wind.

Prototype of new method of catching wind

This method has a conductive shaft that swings in the wind (you can see the wire going down the hole in the prototype picture — there’s a piece of plastic taped to the wire to catch the wind), and a conductive ring for the shaft to make contact with (in the prototype, this is the foil) — if it swings too far, the metals touch and complete the circuit. It’s a very simple concept. After doing the quick proof of concept version, I started designing the final. I decided I’d like a plastic box to build it inside. I was about to go to radio shack to get a few small project boxes when Jesse reminded me he had the vacuum form setup — this was the first time we got to use it.

Here you see the vacuum table (like a reverse air hockey table) and the foam molds I made. The process involves heating the plastic sheet until it is sagging and very flexible like cloth — you then turn on the vacuum table and press the plastic sheet onto the top of the object you’re casting.

Here is the result — not perfectly flush with the bottom corners, but good enough for my application.

I’ll be drilling a hole into the top of these and they will replace the double wire harness you see in the proof of concept version posted earlier.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an entry. Finals were the second week of May — this semester marked the completion of my Japanese minor and the New Media classes required for my major (all I have left are some general art classes and a science course before I can graduate).

The day after my last final, I helped with a New Media workshop at the Dallas Museum of Art — the day after the workshop, I began moving into a house. Before I managed to finish moving in, I went to Japan for a weeklong trip.

I’ve been back for a few days and have been busy again moving out of my old place and into the new. Moved the final piece of furniture today with the help of a U-Haul trailer. It was quite difficult getting this couch inside our older, thinner doorways.

Tomorrow I’ll be moving my Digital Wind Chime project to the house of a fellow classmate who has generously offered the use of his garage as a sort of studio for the class to continue working on our projects. Hopefully progress is rapid and I’ll be able to update the blog often.

I expect to be done with the Digital Wind Chime project in mid July — after which I’ll be turning my focus to game development again.

Until now, I’ve been thinking of doing the majority of the software work in Processing. But I think I’ve found a better solution for myself. It’ll take more work to get it working, but once I have the foundation done I’ll be able to rapidly get it functioning. I’ve run across Arduino USB — a firmware for Arduino that allows it to function as a USB HID device. Even though arduino uses a usb cord, it’s actually a serial connection. I’ll have to make a usb shield.

Hopefully mine ends up looking like this one

Using a usb shield and the Arduino USB firmware, I’ll be able to trigger keystrokes as if it was a keyboard. The huge advantage that gives me is being able to interface with Construct. I’m very familiar with Construct and it’ll make it much easier for me to create a good software component of the Digital Wind Chime. I’m ordering the components now and will be trying to build the shield asap.

edit: Scratch all this. I’ve found a much better solution for my needs. GoBetwino is a generic software proxy. Arduino sends it commands via serial, GoBetwino can launch programs and simulate keystrokes. Using this, I already have my arduino talking to Construct and the software infrastructure is mostly done now — in terms of software, just need to do the arduino code (relatively simple) and make all the music. With this accomplished, I’ll be concentrating on the hardware side the next few days. So stay tuned for upcoming updates where I’ll hopefully have some hardware progress to show and I’ll explain more of the Digital Wind Chime’s functionality.

Today I started experimenting with actually making my free rotating circuit rotate.

Using toothpicks and some cut up flash cards, I crafted some primitive fan blades to catch the wind.

I had ordered a high wind output computer case fan from newegg and made a primitive paper tunnel so the wind could be more directed.

Here’s a video of it in action. I’m using the same ball bearings that are part plastic, so this prototype still has issues of maintaining connectivity when it spins too fast. I did some early tests with a full metal ball bearing and I think they are immune to this problem, so I’ll be ordering new ball bearings for when I start building the actual components.

Before this test, I was worried about being able to generate enough wind easily. It ended up working better than expected (it spun way too fast if I pointed it directly at it), which allows me more flexibility. It means I can have more weight on the spinning component and it means I can simply reduce the voltage to the fan to tweak the interaction to my liking.

A friend in grapevine is involved with a weekly Fighting Game segment as part of the Dead Pirate Studios channel on justin.tv (no relation to me). We played Street Fighter IV for the entire duration — some matches were amongst ourselves and then we also played against some of the viewers live through XBL.

Here’s a clip (I’m playing El Fuerte — the wrestling… chef)

Watch live video from Dead Pirate Studios on Justin.tv

Haven’t been playing as Fuerte long so I hope to improve — I did alright but still need to work on some match ups.

Right now classes conflict with their usual monday show, but apparently they broadcast on other days — I may make some thursday appearances in the future. If that happens, I’ll try to provide a link ahead of time so you can tune in and watch live.

While researching kinetic sculptures for inspiration to employ in my DWC (Digital Wind Chime), I found that it may be very useful to have components with full 360 degree rotation. Rotating components can be visually appealing, can react well to wind, and work great with accelerometers — three great advantages for application in my DWC. For reasons explained a bit later, none of the kinetic sculptures I ran across use electronics throughout the rotating components. The obvious hurdle would be the wires and how they would get wound up as the component rotated — preventing free rotation.

This is a 3D concept I made earlier today. The red box represents the accelerometer which will measure the orientation of the rotating component. The body of the rotating component is rendered in wireframe so you can see inside. The cylinders are ball-bearings and they are key in this working.

Ball-bearings allow rotation around an axle with little resistance. They work great for rotating wind-driven components, but I also took advantage of the fact that the inner rim, outer rim, and the balls inside are all made of metal (which of course conduct electricity). These parts are all separate and moving, but I can use them to complete a circuit because they’re always in contact.

After doing the 3D sketch to confirm my logic was strong, I set out to build a prototype to test it. I had some ball-bearings from a pair of rollerblades and made the axle out of an ink pen’s shaft (after some sanding). I drilled a small hole for a wire to fit through and carved out a notch for it to sit in, but still be exposed to (and make contact to) the inner rim of the ball-bearing. With the wire in place, I slid the ball-bearing onto the axle over wire. To confirm connectivity, I taped an LED (taking the place of my accelerometer) to the outer rims of both ball-bearings. When I actually build the Digital Wind Chime, what will be attached to the outer rims will be a mass designed to move easily with the wind with the accelerometer placed at the center of rotation.

And here it is lighting up the LED with free rotation.

While I’d call it a success, there are still issues. If I spin it fast enough, it will break the circuit — I haven’t confirmed whether this was due to the internals of the ball-bearings ceasing contact during quicker movement (a potentially significant issue) or whether the wires of the LED disconnect due to inertia (something that wouldn’t be an issue in the final project, as i’d permenantly affix them to the bearings). Either way I’m not too worried — I don’t expect any part of the DWC to move that fast and can do things to reduce that possibility as well. Another potential solution would be to use all-metal bearings (the ones I used for this prototype have plastic walls). Regardless, more extensive testing and prototyping will be conducted.

Because I only use my arcade stick with PS3 and PC, it didn’t make much sense to have the stick use a PS2 PCB and require an adapter. I had also never soldered and wired the start and select buttons, which became somewhat of a pain when I couldn’t skip the intros in Street Fighter IV.

The replacement PCB I chose was the Cthulhu — compatible with PC and PS3 (including support for PS3’s Home button). The comparison shows how much cleaner this wiring job is and how much space the Cthulhu saves. The detatchable USB cord is also a plus.
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I finished what will be the software foundation for my Digital Wind Chime 2.0. I have the arduino set up running firmata and a Processing patch handling the accelerometer inputs and translating the x, y axis to width and height of the ellipse. I also have it cycle through different colored backgrounds, and this behavior is triggered by tilting it far enough to the left (shown on the left side of that image). This basic behavior will be similar to how my Digital Wind Chime will generate music. Different values will trigger different sounds. It is also possible for the device to ‘progress’ to different moods, which will employ different sound sets.

Here you can see an additional concept for the Digital Wind Chime that I recently developed (earlier prototype also shown)

Over the next day, I’ll be putting together a more formal proposal for this project. At this point, I think it’s a bit too early to announce what I’m proposing the project for — but if it all comes together like it seems it will, it will be significant and exciting.

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This is my current working character sketch with a quick coloring job (waist and above shown) — I’m currently deciding whether to have it be dark with bright accents or bright with dark accents. The decision there will likely decide the general appearance of the game’s background. For now, I think I’m leaning toward the bright one — I think it’s simply more interesting.

The video is of me playing — recorded and uploaded to youtube directly from the PS3.

I love trying out new game concepts and I love it even more when it’s cheap. This $5 game is unlike anything else I’ve played. You control two ends of Noby Noby Boy — his head and rear — with each analog stick. You can eat things, you can shoot things out your rear, and you can sort of fly, too. On a per-player basis, there’s not necessarily a point to the gameplay — just mess around, which luckily is fun enough. But you can report your length to Girl and, as a global community, everyone contributes to the progress — I assume we’ll unlock new levels etc, once the total collaborative length exceeds required amounts. I think there’s actually a ton of potential in this communal progress concept, so I hope Noby Noby Boy realizes it.

edit: trying out Vimeo for video uploading