A third of the way in! By Friday I’d built a portable air quality sensor that works with a lithium ion battery and an SD card logger but no sign of a nice laser cut case. I’ve had to make do with my lunchbox with a few holes drilled in the lid for the time being. This week I’ll hopefully get to calibrate it with the help of environmental scientists from Birmingham University. Full credit to the lad (he doesn’t leave a name on his site) who wrote up how to adapt the sensor I’m using for greater sensitivity.
When I wasn’t spending time soldering and desoldering things I coded an openFrameworks program that does a pretty good job of identifying when someone takes a breath from video footage from the web cam alone. It works well if people stand still but is totally useless if they’re moving but I’ve designed my interaction scheme around this so I’m confident it’ll still be useful. I’m spending this week setting it up to work with a kinect, which has thus far been a total nightmare.
I also did some more field recording and tried to go full ambient in the studio over the weekend. Unfortunately I picked up my drum machine and 303 and ended up making really weird microtonal xenharmonic acid instead so I’ll have to go back to the drawing board there….