don’t worry

I was very busy with my project, that, I couldn’t post about what’s going on. These days, I’m working on visual side, it’s few steps away to finish.

I decided to stick with basic shapes, that change their forms according to the data from users and also a little data from music. So, any user, using a transmitter, will hear manipulated sound and will see the changes on shape’s form, on-the-fly.

I’ll send the users’ data to another computer that run Quartz Composer via OSC. Because the projection will be far enough.

During my tests, I found out that one receiver is not enough for four transmitter (sounds logical, right?) or Xbee Processing library can’t handle data from multiple data source. Sooner or later one transmitter is invading the data pool and other transmitters’ data get lost. To overcome this sh*tty problem, I tried to allocate one receiver per transmitter. In this case, everything went smoothly. So, I ordered two more XBee 1mW Chip Antenna + Xbee Explorer USB kit from Sparkfun.

For the product design side of the transmitters, I’m working with a friend of mine, a fashion designer. If we’ll have a finished design I’ll post here.

Here’s the working hardware prototype. Unit on the left is the receiver (Xbee on Sparkfun Xbee breakout board + de-chipped Arduino) and the right one is the one of transmitters(Xbee on Xbee Lilypad breakout board). Receiver must be physically connected to the computer for data bridge. Receivers will work wirelessly on battery.

During my research, I found out that Xbee can operate standalone, transmit or receive data through 6 I/O pins. So I don’t have to use any microcontroller. Thanks to Dan Shiffman and Rob Faludi for Xbee Processing API, I managed to gather accelerometer data correctly (but needs noise filtering) and send to Ableton Live as MIDI signal. Next move is fine tuning.

“parametric” is my interactive multimedia senior project that includes audience into the audio/visual production process and gives them a chance to be a part of the performance.

Users will choose one of the controller and will manipulate audio and visuals in real time.

Every controller will have an accelerometer to produce data and a wireless transmitter to send it the computer for processing. Each controller will control specific parameter.

Software
Ableton Live and Processing to control parameters
Quartz Composer and VDMX to generate visuals

Hardware
Arduino Lilypad
Xbee
Accelerometer

Basic Workflow