Montreal Part Deux

See what I did there? tossed in a bit of french without even thinking about it.

Moving on...


Fitting the pneumatic tubes with electronics proved to be more difficult than anticipated. Our trial runs with taping the sensors to the tubes worked well, but was a little fragile, especially if people were rubbing up against them as they penetrated the structure. To solve this, we needed to cover the sensors in a manner that protected them while still allowing them to function effectively. After various trials, we taped the sensors to a collar constructed of the tubing that slid over the tubes.


This was effective initially, however, using a collar provided a constant air pressure that meant that when constricted, all sensors would fire at once, or one would close and negate any input from other sensors on the same tube. In addition to this, a variance in air pressures meant that each sensor needed to be calibrated...

The environmental sensors were actually contact sensors, made from the electrical contacts canibalized from old keyboards. The distance between the two contacts, and the area of pressure that acts on the sensor are the two major variables that allow you to tune the sensor. We needed a few of these buggers so we had a sensor building party! Jeff Palistch from RPI then spent a late night trying to configure the sensors and collars accompanied by some boreal, a local micro brew.

Detuning the sensors to the point where they were no longer triggered by changes in air pressure not only solved the "input overlap" but cut the time requirements considerably. the sensors would only respond to people brushing against them when they penetrated the ring, or a very strong increase in air pressure - like when someone hugged a tube.

These sensors were then wired to act as a switch for some hacked LED toys from the local dollar store. These toys resembled Lightsabres, and would change the pattern of the contined flashing leds each time the switch was closed. This was not quite the delay circuits we were originally intending, however they were far less expensive, pre-constructed, and stil retained the ability to provide some sort of recognition of passage / interaction with the structure. We also ran into a wire shortage, meaning that these lightsabres would need to be wired with close proximity to the sensors in a parallel circuit, so into the collar they went.

At this point Drew and Rachel came in with some very cool hacked personal security alarms which were then wired to a photo resistor taped to the LEDs, and the output was sent to a mixer / amp which produced some intresting / odd / awesome sounds. When multiple signals from these alarms interacted on their way to the mixer, the interference produced even odder sound, all based on the pattern of the flashing LED. Kai's car was also functioning, however, detuning of the sensors meant that the feedback loop was realized.


All in all, I think we accomplished a pretty intresting peice of work. The collaberation with members of RPI was fantastic and the location couldn't have been better. Thanks to all our team members, Concordia university, Patrick and Ted.