This entry is all about the electronic components and the coding for Space Shell 3. This textile is supposed to also have textile speakers activated by several capacitive sensors. It should be more complex then Space Shell 1 where one sensor triggers one sound and only one sound can be played at the same time. At Space Shell 3, however, it should be possible to touch more sensors at the same time and simultaneously hear more sounds at the same time. This only works with one soundboard for each speaker. As one adafruit soundboard is quite expensive and I don't have any sponsorship, I asked my electronics geek friend what to buy and now I got these very small mp3 boards directly from China (see picture above).
Here is the story of making it run throughout a Chinese interface....
see datasheet here: http://www.uctronics.com/download/BY8301-16P_voice_module_manual%20V1.2.pdf
Flashing the BY 8301-16P is a bit more complicated than flashing the adafruit soundboard: First the soundboard software only runs on Windos7 and XP. I had to lend another laptop since I work with Macintosh. The Interface looks weird, but easy to run once you catch on it.
Then again the saving of the sound files works differently then with the adafruit soundboard where you save the files to the pin by giving them a specific name.
With this mp3 soundboard the name makes no difference but the order of how you open it in the interface before the upload.
The board has 6 IO pins which means 6 files and each combination (like IO1*IO2) gives another file possibility.
I want to use IO2 and IO4 so I have space between the pins, which makes it easier to sew to them later on. This means, I can store 3 sound files: on IO2, IO4 and IO2*IO4 which is file number 13. See screen shots of the uploading process below.
Thinking about the arrangement of all the components, the circuit, the logic of the connection between touch and sound and doing sketches to communicate with my friend who is helping with Arduino code.
1. picture: logic sketch of pins and arrangement
2. & 3. picture: test set-up for soundboards with capcitive sensor and textile speaker
Status Monday 18th June, 9.15 am:
The soundboard is working strangely. I do not get how to trigger the sounds. I made this documentation.
But if you can't solve the problem yourself, check the WWW for help and be sure someone had your problem before, maybe solved it and shared the solution.
This is an Arduino library for the BY8301-16P Mp3 Soundboard:
https://github.com/NachtRaveVL/BY8X01-16P-Arduino
The big advantage: you do not save the files on each PIN you want to have it and later connect the pins. In this case you just save all files you want to play and only make a bus connection, which means connecting the RX-TX TX-RX from the soundboard and an Arduino board or Lilypad Mainboard in my case.
With the Lily you then program the time at which a file should be played. This is very easy, I can play much more files and sew only one connection with conductive yarn to the Lily controller.
But the difficulties continued: to sew the boards on fabric I had to unsolder all the legs of the soundboards, which unfortunately where presoldered. This was really difficult and I killed three of the boards. Some solderpins got loose and completly broke out so I could not use the pins anymore.
The first and second picture below shows two of the broken boards. I bought eight boards, three broke, so I just had the five boards I wanted on the fabric. But unfortunately when I had everything connected and sewn on, one sensor did not respond and it was actually the fifth soundboard which had one loose connection.
I took the board out of the circuit as you can see in the third and fourth picture below.
How to proceed now? I had no soundboards left and actually I liked this process of failure. Once more it showed how fragile electronics are and especially their textile realization. This was now an option to show this process to the people exploring this Space Shell.
The emty space of the missing soundboard is clearly visible and I love the spiky ends of the wire loops standing up into the air. To me it looks like a wound of a patient lying on the operation table. This "patient" is part of the process and should be shown, instead of e.g. sewing on one of the broken soundboards and make it look like everything is working, which probably nobody would notice I suppose.
Process Input tab:
setOutputs tab:
