It’s been such a long time that I’m beginning to question whether I heard it correctly or rather read it correctly. But I’m sure I did. I’m sure that Pebble said that that was something that they were working on ages ago, but so far, it hasn’t arrived unless I’ve missed it. What would I use it for? I don’t know to be honest, maybe nothing at all in the end, but I’d like to have the chance to play around with it.
Category: Tech
At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.
The Rex family
This is now a near complete collection! I do love these little PDAs. They’re so special.
SoundLab Play Space: SubPac
I’ve known about SubPac for some time. I think I saw them at a Roli event I was speaking at last year. I thought it was a great idea but I’d never had a chance to try it out, that is not until the SoundLab Play Space event. I have to say that I was really impressed with it. It feels amazing, totally amazing. I think it’s really had to put into words what it’s like as it is really a feeling and an experience and as such it’s difficult to translate it into words.
However, if you ever get a chance to try one out then I’d strongly suggest you do.
A beautiful addition to my Ukulele
I’ve been playing around with this hardware and iOS app for a little while and it’s really good. It works just so well with my Ukulele. I wanted to do some work around creating soundscapes using my Ukulele and iOS effects apps and this has done completely what I needed.
I’ll be putting together some sound samples from this soon, so you’ll be able to hear what I mean.
Ototo at the SoundLab Play Space
I’ve mentioned the Ototo a number of times before, I’m a fan. I really like it. I think that Ototo is a really useful, and a really fun piece of equipment. So it was great to have the Ototo from Dentaku at the SoundLab Play Space. As usual we got it hooked up to a bunch of fruit, which, whilst fun to play with, kind of doesn’t show just how much it can do.
Personally I think that the Ototo excels when used with its interesting range of sensors. Of course, the other thing that you can use the Ototo with is conductive ink. Yep, that works, and works well too. I should post some of the interactions that are possible using the Ototo, and will do soon.
I don’t know what Dentaku have planned for the Ototo, but I do hope it keeps going and moves forward. Anything else would be a shame.
A big thank you to The Memo
Thanks for that Mr Concretedog!
Using Conductive Ink Proximity Pads with Ableton
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
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.
Whilst the tape removal wasn’t an entire success it was ok and didn’t stop the pads from working which was good.
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
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.
I am Ashley Elsdon 