While for testing purposes the Polymer Lithium Ion Battery – 2000mAh sku: PRT-08483 and LiPoly Charger – Single Cell 3.7-7V Input sku: PRT-00726 may do… further reading of Comments and datasheets suggests they may not be a final choice.

Cons

• ~6hrs charging a 2000mAh battery at 280mA max
• JST connectors can be *extremely* difficult to remove!

Pros:

• Battery includes built-in protection against over voltage, over current, and minimum voltage.
• useful 3 connectors – one to battery, one to circuit, third for 5V that powers the charger – so can charge the battery and power device at the same time.
• through holes in the PCB for remote LED

So looks like we’ll need something more like:

• LiPoly Fast Charger – 5-12V Input – sku: PRT-08293 – $19.95
• Polymer Lithium Ion Battery – 6Ah – sku: PRT-08484 – $39.95
• Wall Adapter Power Supply – 5VDC 1A – $5.95 – a 5V regulated power supply – although it has a US plug.
• Jumper Wire – JST Black Red – $0.95

which seems a bit expensive all in… particularly since we’ll require two battery packs – one in use and one on charge… (more…)

While worth buying to test the Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo shield and get some hands-on experiments done I suspected the Solarbotics GM17 might not be the best motor for the job(s) in the Modular Music Box – requiring +9V, having little torque at low speed and being quite noisy – though it is quite compact and did just manage to fit centrally in the monome size casing alongside an Arduino Duemilanove clone…

Further research suggested that a stepper motor would be the best choice to drive the sequencer and animation turntables. In the interim I tested a stepper motor from Fab Lab Manchester – the six wire PF35T-48L4 – a 7V (though it will supposedly run as low as 5V) 20ohms UNIPOLAR, S/A 3.6deg stepper motor. The makingthings.com Stepper Motor How-tos helped me identify the yellow and orange as one pair, the black and brown as the other and the red and green wires as the center taps.

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Before I emailed Pablo Gian Villamil and he sent me on a link to his class notes (yay!) for Generating polyphonic sound with Arduino I tried to work out his circuitry from his various blog posts and component listings…

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Really nice example of use of a contemporary praxinoscope…

Moray McLaren – We Got Time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9e38cuhnaU&feature=related

Moray McLaren – We Got Time – Behind the Scenes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrBnH6LIGtA&feature=related



I bought a small 3-4.5V DC motor to start testing for the rotary magnetic sequencer I’m planning as part of the Modular Music Box for the Analogue is the new Digital exhibition as part of AND Festival…

Todbot’s Bionic Arduino: Introduction to Microcontrollers with Arduino: Class 3 has a section on Controlling a Motor using a 1N4001 ‘kickback’ diode and TIP120 transistor to “control speed of motor with analogWrite() just like controlling brightness of LED” which I still need to try out.

Then there’s a fairly thorough post at Lucky Larry’s ARDUINO, MAINLY ARDUINO PROJECTS, TUTORIALS… AND A FEW OTHER THINGS blog – Control a DC motor with Arduino and L293D chip… but (sigh)… I think I’ll just buy a shield kit.
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First stage planning for fabrication, electrical components, Arduino code and general thoughts for the various modules of the Modular Music Box.

Rotary Magnetic Sequencer

mounting

• walnut box – sides + base – (same dimensions as monome?)
• subtle Art Nouvea/William Morris style laser etching embellishment?
• top panel – Alupanel® aluminium composite (can this be cut on the Fablab laser cutter? – NO)/translucent acrylic
• playback head – to hold 12 x hall effect sensors, 12 x 10k(?) resistors, 12 x 3mm orange LEDs, 12 x 150 Ohm resistors – double check resistor value for multiple LEDs in parallel – cabling
• melody disks – 64 step – 12 x 3mm x 1mm disk magnets per step – 3 layers of 1mm clear acrylic – edge clips to fold three layers together? have Illustrator prototype template

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We’ve been invited to contribute to the ‘Analogue is the new Digital’ exhibition as part of the AND Festival in Manchester in October ’10. It’s a modest fee of £400 and Nick and I are still deciding what work we could produce.

We’ve proposed a couple of ideas i response to the brief… attached as a PDF – analogue-digital

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After months of  quietude here at Monomatic development blog central, Lewis has finally found time to update and rationalise the WordPress backend, give the site a bit of a thematic facelift, categorise and tag the existing entries and post about recent Monomatic projects…

Development for  the Modular Music Box should really have been posted from May ’10… and for PEAL @ Kinetica Art Fair 10 from Jan ’10…

Better late than never…

Interesting possibilities emerging for triggering and synchronising video via the in-house Alpine McBride Video Binloop 16 track video player which uses Compact Flash cards…

Steady progress… still some things outstanding according to my reQall list… but hoping to catch up this week.

1. Confirming Church participation and dates for visits and filming.

a) I’ve already visited St Peters Church aka Leeds Parish Church (LPC)

St Peter’s Church (Leeds Parish Church), Kirkgate, LS2 7DJ
12 bells
Practice: Thurs 7:30
Visit: Thursday, 9th July, 7.30-9pm
Filming: either Sunday, 9th or Sunday 16th August, 1-6pm

b) Through Steve Ollerton, Tower captain at St Peters (Leeds Parish Church) I’ve now made contact and arranged a visit and reconnoiter with a further three churches:

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Nick and I are trying out reQall “a voice-enabled memory aid that seamlessly integrates your mobile phone, email, text messaging and IM into a powerful organizer, reminder system and productivity assistant.”

I like the idea of a tool used for a specific project – and with reQall its easy to add notes, To-Dos and shopping list items via text, voice, email and IM – and share these with others – which seems ideal for a creative and collective project like PEAL – and a good way to document our development too.

What’s more you can publish your Reqall items through an RSS feed – here’s Lewis’s Reqall items for example.

[flickr]photo:3709302925[/flickr]

1. Visit the Leeds City Museum and discuss technicalities with Tom Pace, Senior AV Technician
2. Meet with Sue Ball from MAAP
3. Visit Leeds Parish Church for a practice bell ringing session and meet with Steve Ollerton, Tower Captain and the group
4. Visit other possible churches – time permitting…

Resulting in the following notes (they’re quite extensive – sorry):

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In setting up the Monomatic Flickr account I came across this existing  and unintentionally hilarious Monomatic listing on Flickr (part of the fantastic ‘Old Airport’ set in Mirsasha’s photostream)… look at the name badge – “Push to Flush” just has to be the name of our first album 😉

[flickr]photo:111215588(medium,1)[/flickr]

Nick Rothwell has developed an application for a monome64 to trigger and position sounds within the Illustrious’ 3D-AudioScape surround sound system.

My camera can’t quite capture all the button flashes – but you get the idea…

There’s an initial schematic of the button layout and functionality as PDF… though this was just a starting point and has since been superseded.

Nick used shado – his own open-source compositing and sprite library – to enable the monome to trigger up to eight individual sounds (via MIDI note-on on separate MIDI channels), set their volume  (controller #7) and allow each to be positioned both within the x-y plane (controllers #2 & #3) and z plane (controller #4) of the sound field (3D-AudioScape is unique in that it also has a z-axis positional component due to its two rings of speakers – one on the ground and one in the air). The app also has a mode for calibrating the output of the monome64 accelerometer to allow the position of a sound in the x-y plane to be controlled via tilt.

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In brief… it’s been more than a while since our last post…

Lewis got caught up with work for Martyn Ware’s Illustrious Company from May 08 – producing and coordinating a range of sonically themed projects…

Ant started a new job at at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design in Jan 09…

“So many ideas. So little time.”

But we do want to move things forward – even in modest ways – and so have resolved to work together on our earliest idea – discome. Now if Ant can only get a version of Director installed on his new Oslo School laptop 😉

We also plan to invite others to join us under the monomatic umbrella to work on specific projects:

• So Nick Rothwell (perhaps with a bit of input from Jules Rawlinson) is going to co-develop the Monome meets 3D-AudioScape;
• and possibly Daniel Jones is going to help realise the idea of a a collaborative, networked,  multi-monome type thing  – which seems not to have much mention in this blog other than as occasional references to our first-step ‘get the networking working’ idea of Battleships – which subsequently morphed into squidsoup’s Stealth Project…

More news soon…