Adrian Freed

The current growth of the Arduino platform is fueled by the many new boards that make it easier to squeeze Atmega processors and their associated peripherals into ever smaller spaces or unusual places such as clothing. Neather hoarding or fetishism explain my large and growing collection of Arduinos (official and unofficial) - I use them to test the sketches and libraries that I share and to teach people how to pick the best one for their applications in

Dates:Saturday May 15 and Sunday May 16, 2010

from 10am to 5pm

Description

Now that I have assembled one of the largest collection of e-textile materials and associated tools I am trying to figure out the smallest winning subset that can form a portable lab.

Not my first publication, but my first one with some challenging engineering. I did this in my late teens and it was published in a hobby electronics magazine, "Electronics Australia". I discovered by accident that some folk from Greece published the same ideas in a professional technical journal in 1989 (attached). If you are a scholar of such things it is interesting to compare and contrast the modes of articulation in my vernacular engineering approach with those of the academic paper.

This controller demonstrates how most resistive touch screen systems can be modified to provide independent sensing of two positions on the surface. A single pressure measurement is also provided with a third sensing layer. A pair of SlideWide sensors (http://infusionsystems.com) are stuck to each other at right angles.

Illuminated button array music controllers have a long history. I was fortunate to meet the late great, Salvatore Martirano who pioneered the construction of large button array music synthesizers.

This example uses the recommended OSC SLIP wrapping for OSC serial messages. Attached is an example Max/MSP patch to display the OSC messages which represent the pin states, temperature and power supply voltages. You may need slipOSC from the CNMAT downloads page to unwrap the USB serial OSC. This is a simple introduction to building OSC messages. Yotam Mann has built a complete library for Arduino that does the full OSC protocol It is available from CNMAT. This example uses the recommended OSC SLIP wrapping for OSC serial messages. Attached is an example Max/MSP patch to display the OSC messages which represent the pin states, temperature and power supply voltages. You may need slipOSC from the CNMAT downloads page to unwrap the USB serial OSC. This is a simple introduction to building OSC messages. Yotam Mann has built a complete library for Arduino that does the full OSC protocol It is available from CNMAT.

/*
 * OSCuino Rough
 * Copyright 2009 Adrian Freed.   

Experimental surface sensing for fingerstyle players

I don't use the stock "official" Arduino boards for my work. The $18 teensy 2.0 is smaller than any of the stock Arduinos, has more A/D pins than any of them except the Mega, has more memory, more PWM pins, full speed USB serial support and has a more accurate crystal cock instead of a resonator. You can buy them from the designer ($18$16) or from Lady Ada ($20). Sketch loading and restart is much faster because of the high speed USB port.

The FTDI drivers aren't necessary with the Teensy and you can add the Teensyduino overlay to run your Arduino sketches.

The overlay has several high performance features the Arduino core group haven't got round to yet: the A/D is run in high speed mode and the serial port implementation is efficiently interrupt driven on input and output.

So what is the catch? Some hardware improvements I suggest: get the silkscreen right for Arduino nomenclature, move the led from an analog input to a digital pin and build it with the 3.3v regulator on board and a switch (like the seeeduino boards) ditto for the teensy++. I would pay the extra few dollars for this.

If I really have to use the original Arduino form factor (to leverage a useful shield) I use the seeeduino or olimexino. They are compatible, comparably priced and have some handy extra switches, power supply features and break out the 2 extra A/D pins often omitted on other boards.

An audio oscillator using digital ICs, Freed, A. , Electronics Australia, Volume 39, Number 10, p.53-4, (1978)