This week, we met our proof of concept milestones. Although we had to move the goalpost a little bit. Originally we intended to build a preliminary frame using 5 solenoids and single shift register. However, the solenoids we ordered were too weak (5N instead of 25N) for us to get a granular output force, so we decided to forgo building the preliminary frame since we’ll have to design that to the specifications of the 25N solenoids. Instead, we set out to complete a set of milestones for the project that would give us the confidence needed to build the final interface. Those included controlling a series of solenoids using bits loaded in from a shift register, and figuring out what the “play rate” of our solenoids were (i.e how many times can we actuate the solenoid ever second).
This week I started taking some very important steps towards building the signal processing module. I’ve begin writing a script that will generate the output text file containing information about what keys should be pressed in order to reproduce an audio recording.
The entire script has been implemented as a jupyter notebook, with captioning and explanations in between code samples.
Link: https://gist.github.com/aceamarco/9ec5c12c7ecedc07ea55a951e4483284
Here are some of the plots I’ve generated from the script:
