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Thanks to everyone who supported my Movember campaign

I really really appreciate the support from everyone who contributed to my campaign this year. Whilst I didn’t hit my goal in the end, I didn’t do too badly, so I’m glad that I did it again this year. That’s four years on the go for me and Movember.

Will I do it next year? Who knows, we’ll just have to wait and see. Will I keep the moustache? Maybe …

So, here we are, in December

I know that it’s stupid to say stuff like “I can’t believe it’s December already”, but that’s how it feels. I suppose it’s because November (Movember) has really flown by, especially with all the focus on the SoundLab Play Space event. That really did take up a huge amount of time and effort. It was worth it though. Completely worth it.

So December, Christmas, 2015 coming to a close and all that Jazz. I’ve still got a few things I’d like to get done this month. One of which is getting more out on how to use conductive ink pads with music apps, but there are a few other project that I hope to come back to this month too.

Anyway, for now, happy December.

Using Conductive Ink Proximity Pads with Ableton

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

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.