2020-05-22 (F) Weekly Summary

I printed and installed ribbon holders to keep the semiconductive plastic from drooping onto the aluminum bar. Even the pressure from gravity was enough to activate the circuit. The plastic pars could slide a bit, so I held them under tension with a rubber band. I fastened each ribbon at the far end.
Rubber band holding ribbons taut

I still had to affix the console to the aluminum bar. The holder needed to isolate the board connections from shorting against the bar, and I wanted it to look clean. I went through a few designs in my head, but in the end, I went with a straightforward shape that would print without any fuss.
Board holder model

 I got everything mounted, tuned, and ready to play. It should have been easy to connect the Atari Punk Console to a mixer and combine it with a microphone when I recorded a short demonstration, but I didn't want to risk sending too much power through my electronics. The video took a handful of takes to get one that flowed, and that wrapped up the APCTouch.
(0:53) APCTouch in action

A while ago, I read Gastrophysics by Charles Spence. My biggest takeaway, among many cool things, was the "Sonic Chip" experiment. Test subjects ate a bunch of Pringles chips and listened to crunching sounds through headphones. Some of the clips sounded muffled, and some were clean. The result was that they believed the chips were stale or fresh, depending on the sound. The best part was that even folks in on the experiment could experience the sensation.

I worry about my Alexa listening in on my conversations and then marketing to me based on that information. My plan of retaliation is to make the house robot listen to pseudo-random words all day. I hope this interference will nullify the marketing algorithms, and they waste their banner ads with products I can ignore.

The first step was arranging a few thousand nouns in a spreadsheet, selecting one based on the RAND() function, and reading it out loud.

(0:17) Prandom word generation

Using a full-size computer to execute my spreadsheet continuously would be inefficient. I didn't need all that power, but a Raspberry Pi should have no trouble keeping up. Not all the tricks I used for a Windows machine translated, most notably the macros. Instead of learning a macro program for Linux, I programmed an Arduino capable of keyboard emulation.

(0:19) Video recording from RasPi 4 B and Arduino

First time here?

Completed projects from year 1
Completed projects from year 2
Completed projects from year 3
Completed projects from year 4
Completed projects from year 5
Completed projects from year 6
Completed projects from year 7

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