Plugged both of my guys in today, and had fun with stretta’s Polygomé (running on my 64) and my BeatSeq (on my 128). The audio is horrible, mostly because the mic of the tiny camera i was using (a flip) was pointed down, not at the speakers. Also, it’s a mic of unfortunate quality. I will take the audio from the line out next time, or at least record it in logic simultaneously.  I’m using Polygomé to send MIDI out to logic, where i’m using the ES1 synth.  It sounded nice and bass-y in front of my monitors, too bad the mic didn’t capture any of it.  More Soon!!

Schematic

Pin three on the right side is the important part – it is raising and then sinking a voltage at an adjustable rate, which is what operates as the switch.  Two power relays (which can handle up to 220volts) are then attached to the PNP/NPN section, which is what you connect any apparatus to (robot arms, vacuum cleaners etc).

We started by building the circuit on a breadboard, which was met with instant success, everyone had theirs working within the first hour of the workshop.  Then the real work came when we had to design and furbish our own PCB boards for permanent implementation of the circuit.

This got extremely tedious, and real frustrating.  Nick and I left after working on it for 5 hours, our circuits not functioning at all.

Somehow, I perservered, and returned on sunday (yeah, sunday) and fixed my circuit!  Nick is jealz0r.

top of finished PCB

slop solder city. bottom of PCB board

Nick; before reaching the point of utter frustration and humility

nick, joel, claudio, and dan from the left

In this vid, you can see the soldered mess I made on the underside of the PCB board, and all of the components on top. So, so, so sloppy, Joel doesn’t have any faith in my completing any of the ridiculous projects I have proposed for the rest of the semester and beyond. It’s ok, I’ll show him.

Only thing left is to include the on/off switch in the project box enclosure, as well as terminals for the power relays to connect to the robot eyes / traffic lights i’m going to control with this beast.

Max and Mimi are lovers.  Mimi is a bunny who likes to show off her bedonk-a-donk, and everytime she does, Max gets real embarrassed about it, and blushes.

This life-like animation is possible only because of the magical accelerometers embedded in both of their cute li’l bodies.  We used Sparkfun’s triple-axis boards that are being read by PIC chips which we programmed.  The PIC BASIC code sets a threshold for the y-axis (yeah we only needed one axis) and when this threshold is reached, the LEDs blink, until the data goes back down.

here's the completed circuit with an LCD screen outputting the axis values

here's how the accelerometer fits in max

As you can see, the accelerometer is quite tiny, so it could fit into lots of different objects…

Here’s a vid!