I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Month: November 2015

Using Conductive Ink Proximity Pads with Ableton

Posted by on in Creative Process, Making things, Music, TechLeave a comment
Conductive Ink Proximity Pads controlling Ableton
Conductive Ink Proximity Pads controlling Ableton
Jo setting up the Conductive Ink Proximity Pads
Jo setting up the Conductive Ink Proximity Pads

One of the technologies we had on show at the SoundLab Play Space was Bare Conductive’s Conductive Ink and TouchBoard. We used these to connect to Ableton Live and control a variety of parameters in a set. It took quite a lot of tinkering around to get the pads and the board to work as we wanted, and a lot of time to calibrate the pads to get them sensing and sending MIDI CCs.

Hopefully I’ll be able to release to arduino code for the set we used soon. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some videos too to show how to get it done.

I think that that the TouchBoard is a really cheap and simple way to create effective gestural control via MIDI.

More on making conductive ink pads for proximity sensing

Posted by on in Creative Process, Making things, TechLeave a comment
Drawing up proximity pads
Drawing up proximity pads

After experimenting with my previous cards I decided to try a larger and denser pad for use as a proximity sensor.

There was a very good little tutorial on the Bare Conductive site so I used that. As you can see above it very sensibly suggests the use of masking tape to make these pads. I followed the instructions and made 4 pads in the end.

Proximity pads drying out
Proximity pads drying out

Whilst the tape removal wasn’t an entire success it was ok and didn’t stop the pads from working which was good.

Conductive ink
Conductive ink

I’m planning to post a much larger post around how to get these pads to work for music and how best to get the code up and running too. It might take a little while to get that going though, so hopefully it’ll be in a week or two.

This is the suit

Posted by on in TechLeave a comment
Armstrong's Space Suit
Armstrong’s Space Suit

I backed this on Kickstarter as I just wanted to be a very tiny part of the this. It didn’t matter how small. Also I think it is really important to preserve things like this, and I thought it was great that people from all over the world got to be a part of it by putting in little money.

Barcodas Page updated

Posted by on in MusicLeave a comment

If you’re interested I’ve just updated my page of Barcodas barcodes as I’ve added a couple of new ones. I often wonder if it’s just me that is interested in barcode music. So I checked on twitter to see if this was in fact the case. Aside from my tweets about barcodes I can find almost nothing. Well, nothing at all actually.

That’s a shame really I think.

Over indulging in Big Finish

Posted by on in Books and AudiobooksLeave a comment

I’ve been listening to a lot of Big Finish lately and, whilst for the most part it’s all very good I’ve realised that there’s always a chance of over indulging on such good listening. I think I may have come to that point recently.

So perhaps it’s time to take a bit of a break from their excellent work. Even possibly for just a week to clear my auditory palette as it were!

A date for the War Doctor

Posted by on in Books and AudiobooksLeave a comment

So Big Finish have now said when they’re going to publish this. It’s just over two weeks away on the 14th of December. So that date is firmly in my diary now! I’m hoping that it’s going to be as good as I’d like it to be. The BBC audiobook was very good indeed, in a somewhat unexpected way, so I hope Big Finish can do even better.