Revolve Press Release

Here is the video of Revolve in action.

PRESS RELEASE

Revolve takes sound interaction and musical creativity to a new level of simplicity, you simply punch holes into a sheet of paper to create your own personally made 8 bit tunes. The idea is simple, you have a wind up motor which spins a central point on a turntable. Along this turntable you have multiple LDR’s all programmed to produce different pitches of sound depending on which LDR’s are visible and which are covered. You take your piece of paper and punch holes according to which pitch of note you would like to play then attach it to the turntable simply by putting a magnet in the centre of the paper, which attaches to the central point which is spinning.
The idea for Revolve started by having lots of LDR’s which would all have an individual pitch of note. We then looked into record players and gramophones and thought it would be good if we could somehow incorporate the two ideas into one. Rather than covering the LDR’s with your finger to make them play we used disk’s of paper (which came from the idea of vinyl’s spinning) then by punching holes in the paper, when these holes are over the LDR the resistance changes which we used to trigger a beat.

Final Finished Product Images

Final working product images.  Fairly happy with it.  Looking pretty good.  It's been a long hard slog.

Revolve in action

1ST Test.  Working!!!!  YAAAAASSSSS!!!

AMAZING 8-BIT MUSIC AND VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbfCZx1tRUs

Getting the electronics inside

Struggling to get all the electronics inside.  ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Blasted electronics

Electronics are being a nightmare.  So many wires....

Revolve in action

Finished!!

Just back from spray factory.  Looking good.  A few small blemishes here and there, but it's a learning curve.  Only the electronics to go!!!

About to take the Turntable down to the spray factory

Should get it back for Monday.  Hopefully it will be £35 well spent.

Amplifiers are in. WOOHOO!!!

Finally got the amplifier.  Just needs to be wired into the breadboard.

Some filler for the gaps

Just some filler and lots of elbow grease today.  Progressing nicely

So far so good

Pen part is the perfect fit

Fits like a glove.  It was meant to be.

Useful pen

Needing a stock for the rotating part.  Pen is mightier than....?

Base and Sanding

Cut the base and sanding everything down this morning.

Well Clamped

With both pieces clamped and gluing.............Thats me finished for another day.

A few holes later...

....and the motor is on.

Motoring on...

The Motor will sit underneath the electronics inside the milled out cylander. 

Milling away

A Better close up view of the milling machine at work.

Gettin jiggy with it!!

Made a jig for the "Cake Tin" to sit in so I can rotate it on the milling machine to hollow it out.

One day on...

All laminated together and sanded.  Starting to take shape.

Things really progressing

All laminated.

Pressing on with the build.

Laminating the curve shapes together to get the top piece constructed.

Engineering Foam "cake tin" will house the electronics.

Design Idea

Quick idea I drew up in Solidworks

I'm thinking of making it out of sheet metal or aluminium.

Not sure though.  Will have to give it some thought.

Prototype 2

Simple record player style prototype. LDR's pick up light through the records holes which triggers samples.

Sonic Interaction Design

http://master.design.zhdk.ch/projekte/sonic-interaction-design

Really smart idea. Could look into similar ideas in our future designs.

spring driven generator

Could have lots of possible applications.

Gramophone Motor in action

Looking at how a Gramophone Motor works

Inventables

Really smart website with loads of weird materials and gadgets. Might
come in handy for this semesters project

http://www.inventables.com/

Backup Box

Similar idea as before but rather than remember events through picture form you can view every post you have ever posted on a social networking site such as twitter.


http://vimeo.com/14119374

microsoft research – timecard

Pretty smart idea. Really like it cos its a simple way to see what people did with their life and the main events that’s occurred. Easy to update and edit

http://vimeo.com/17645562

Prototype 1

Getting there…

It’s been well over a week now since we were shown picaxe and now we are both started to get to grips with how do use it..

So far we have managed a circuit using LED’s, a circuit using  LDR’s to control whether the LED’s light or not, and a few different codes for using a speaker in our circuit.

So far so good!

Picaxe

Yesterday we finally got started with learning how to use picaxe to program things.

We managed to mess about with LED’s and make some sequences with them. From this we played about with adding in variable resistors and LDR’s.

All in all we took a lot from it.

Andy Huntington – Beatbox

Simple design but works really well and is very playful

http://andyhuntington.co.uk/2005/beatbox/

The Brief!

We were given the brief to design a product which you can interact with and somehow alter the sound produced. The main point of this project is to try and be really creative, think out side the box, and really just be playful with our designs. This blog is to show some of our idea’s and designs which we felt influenced us in one way or another.