Project Logs

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• Show Time!

  Jeremy • 08/20/2016 at 01:08 • 0 comments

  TL;DR I'm packing up the floor and heading out to Burning Man with it on Wenesday, August 26th. If you're on the playa, you can see it at 5:15 & D at The Future camp.

  Quick Demo:

  The Final Production

  In my last post, I had put in my production order with MacroFab and was waiting for the boards to come in. Last Friday they arrived and it was beautiful!

  Although, there was one problem...the blade connector for the touch sensor was missing from each board (the empty hole to the left of the Atmega chip). I emailed MacroFab and they bent over backwards to make up for the missing part. The good news is that, once I was in a rhythm, the part only took about 30 seconds to add to each board.

  (Even though there was a mistake, I was really impressed with their customer service and how hard they worked to keep me happy. So I'm still a big fan of Macro Fab.)
  

  A weekend of soldering and assembling and I had a full working dance floor! So far, the touch sensors are working pretty well. A few squares are a little too sensitive, but that can be tweaked in the software.

  This was the goal I had 2 years ago, and it's finally coming together!
  

  See you soon!

  If you're out at burning man, come find me at The Future (5:15 & D).

• Production Order!

  Jeremy • 07/18/2016 at 08:11 • 0 comments

  Last week was a pretty big week -- I put in the full production order of 100 circuit boards to MacroFab!!!

  Test Boards

  This year I'm using MacroFab to do the manufacturing of the boards. This is a new PCB manufacturing and assembly company and I was a little apprehensive; so about 3 weeks ago I ordered a single test board. It was delivered right on time and was simply perfect.

  Isn't it pretty!

  
  

  After running it through a series of tests, all functions appeared to be working. Time to put in the production order...almost.

  Sensitivity Training

  I had been building a series of boards by hand and by the time the test board came in, it was time for more full-scale testing. The great news is the touch sensors still seem to be working well! The less great news is that sometimes they are a bit over sensitive.

  After tweaking a bunch of variables, it seemed that reducing the sampling capacitor from 22nF to 10nF makes tuning the sensitivity much easier.

  Production Order

  Ideally, at this point, I would have time to test the boards with the new capacitors and make sure this is a solid option. Unfortunately, with Burning Man about a month and a half way, I need to get the order in. So I checked everything I could and at about 3am held my breath, closed my eyes, pressed the order button and went to bed.

  So in about 3 weeks I should have about 100 boards at my door step. If everything goes well, we'll have a full-size working dance floor and an awesome party in the desert.

  Until then, more manually assembled boards and testing.

  Wish me luck!
  

• How the touch sensors work

  Jeremy • 07/01/2016 at 01:09 • 0 comments

  The main thing that makes the dance floor interactive is the touch sensors under the surface. This post is going to dive into how this works.

  Read more »

• Production Ready?

  Jeremy • 06/17/2016 at 18:25 • 0 comments

  The past couple months has been a process of:

  1. Test
  2. Find problems.
  3. Send out an order for new PCBs
  4. Test again
  5. Find another program
  6. Bang head against problem
  7. Rinse and repeat

  So pretty much, standard operating procedure. But, as of last night, things are looking up!

  Read more »

• The Results

  Jeremy • 04/22/2016 at 19:58 • 0 comments

  Wow, it's been awhile since I've posted an update. So, you're probably wondering, how'd it go?

  Burning Man Dance Floor Retrospective

  The month leading up to burning man was a mad dash to finish the floor (and, you know, keep a day job). I didn't get much sleep during that time. It was build - test - build - test - eat. I kept running into issues with the capacitive sensors not providing readings that were stable enough at full-scale.

  Everything would start off just fine, but then the sensors would randomly detect things when nothing was there and sometimes the sensors would trigger their neighbors. No amount of filtering would fix it. So, in the interest of getting something working, I dropped that feature from the list and, instead, added a microphone to the system so the floor could react to the music playing. Then we packed it all up and threw it on the truck for burning man.

  The day finally arrived. We were on the Playa and setting up the floor. I was really nervous; I've seen many people waste most of their time out there trying to get their projects to work. I carefully plugged everything in, flipped the switch on the controller computer, and waited.

  Read more »

• Down to the wire

  Jeremy • 08/06/2015 at 00:07 • 0 comments

  A lot has happened in the last month. I've been working nonstop on getting everything finished up and ready for the desert -- which is in a few short weeks (!!!) -- and of course we're running into some last minute problems.

  Read more »

• Build Party Weekend!

  Jeremy • 07/06/2015 at 22:19 • 0 comments

  Is there a better way to spend 4th of July weekend than to build stuff? I don't think so.

  Read more »

• Non blocking Capacitive Sensing

  Jeremy • 06/19/2015 at 23:29 • 4 comments

  I think I've finally created a reliable non-blocking capacitive sensor library for the Atmega!

  
  

  Read more »

• Crystals and blocking timers

  Jeremy • 06/16/2015 at 23:46 • 0 comments

  While putting the new boards through their paces we've found a couple small problems.

  Read more »

• We have circuit boards!

  Jeremy • 06/07/2015 at 21:26 • 3 comments

  Our first batch of circuit boards arrived and they are beautiful!

  And with the boxes of fresh components, it was like [insert your favorite holiday here]!

  Read more »

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