Source

Here is the Maxpatch that constitute the software part of the project:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10322753/BeatBus.maxpat

Project report

Here is the report!

Source code coming soon...

Exhibition day

The exhibition went fairly well. Many people wanted to try out the platform and play music together. Even a journalist from GP found our project interesting, and immediately understood it was meant to be placed at public places! This is the end result:

4:59 am - checking out

After a long night the hardware works superbly, it all feels very robust. When it comes to software... not as good. For hours after hours we have battled, but the result seems a bit dwindling in comparison to our expectations. It is very easy to make large expectations about the possibilities of software in short time. But good interactive music is hard to accomplish. Here's some images of the work over the weekend.

Let there be light

The wooden frame now has a bottom, on which to attach the lamps, and the frame also has some holes for the chords to go through.






10 meters of spline is obtained. It will be placed between the tiles, so that they don't slide.

Framework

With our bare hands (due to lack of tools) we have built a wooden frame for the project.

The parts are put together with angle irons, as shown below.


The frame and plexi glass tiles were taped with copper tape, to form switches. Also foam was cut to be placed in the corners, working as springs for the tiles.





We have also gotten hold of some blue filter, for some of the lamps. They are glued to the plastic with ordinary glue. Under each tile will be one white lamp, and one blue.

Saying hello to the world

The software is begining to fly! We have now built a breadboard prototype and connected it to an arduino mega. The red LEDs are hardwired to the buttons while the blue LEDs are controlled from Arduino outputs. Here the arduino is running a simple testprogram that has the blue LEDs high by default and sets them to low when pressing the corresponding button:

And here we've managed to control the LEDs from Max/MSP! Button input into Max has also been confirmed to work (not shown here):

In other news, the plexi-glass discs has arrived! And today we decided on these lamps with this power supply. It can deliver up to 41 A when having a 12v output, which should suffice. And then some. The lamps were chosen so that we can be assured to avoid fire hazard as they are safely (?) housed.