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I think I should make an icon specifically for electronics.
Cassie's dad gave me a Visa gift card, so I went down to EPO today to spend it. I ended up spending $100 over the gift card amount, but that's how EPO goes. Got some spare cables, adapters, just the random junk I can never find one of when I need it, and some parts for the book I'm working through, etc.
And I got a part for this idea I had.
See, I would like to be able to make Cassie a Theremin. I built a kit but it never worked. It occurred to me that I could use two distance sensors in place of the antennas, and a microcontroller to generate tones. I already had a couple ultrasonic distance sensors, so today I picked up an Arduino shield that generates MIDI notes. It works beautifully.
Unfortunately the sensors don't. In order to get a good reading from them you really need to poll once per second, which you can't do and control a musical instrument with it. It just takes too much time for the ping to return. I got it working at 5 pings per second but it was very inaccurate. So, then I thought, why not use an IR sensor?
Those, sadly, I do not have. I found what looks like a pretty good one but getting two would cost about $30, which is a bit more than I'm willing to put into this project. So at this point I'm really pleased with the music generating part and not at all with the sensor part, so I'm trying to think of a better way to control an instrument. I have a touchscreen shield that needs a home, so maybe that would work.
Cassie's dad gave me a Visa gift card, so I went down to EPO today to spend it. I ended up spending $100 over the gift card amount, but that's how EPO goes. Got some spare cables, adapters, just the random junk I can never find one of when I need it, and some parts for the book I'm working through, etc.
And I got a part for this idea I had.
See, I would like to be able to make Cassie a Theremin. I built a kit but it never worked. It occurred to me that I could use two distance sensors in place of the antennas, and a microcontroller to generate tones. I already had a couple ultrasonic distance sensors, so today I picked up an Arduino shield that generates MIDI notes. It works beautifully.
Unfortunately the sensors don't. In order to get a good reading from them you really need to poll once per second, which you can't do and control a musical instrument with it. It just takes too much time for the ping to return. I got it working at 5 pings per second but it was very inaccurate. So, then I thought, why not use an IR sensor?
Those, sadly, I do not have. I found what looks like a pretty good one but getting two would cost about $30, which is a bit more than I'm willing to put into this project. So at this point I'm really pleased with the music generating part and not at all with the sensor part, so I'm trying to think of a better way to control an instrument. I have a touchscreen shield that needs a home, so maybe that would work.
