Today we got the accelerometer working! We'll need to change how it is set up to get cleaner output, but we do in fact have some output. Also, our conductive fabric (which we had previously been told would be delayed for four weeks) will be here much sooner, though we needed to sacrifice the privilege of using pink fabric for the grey which we are now getting.
Next up is writing the code to use the accelerometer data to produce a rotation and vertical acceleration.
We also decided to document our work with photos, so I'll be uploading photos either to this site or to some photo hosting site at some point.
As a side note, I am also writing a program to use a wacom tablet as instrument with Python + Pygame. Pressure will map to volume, vertical position to frequency, and horizontal position to time until note is played. The interface will be a leftward-scrolling window in which you can draw with the wacom tablet. When whatever you have drawn hits the left side of the window, it will make sound. I'll post more about this later, but if anyone has a good way of getting Wacom Tablet pressure data in Python, feel free to tell me. For some reason reading from /dev/input/wacom (a symlink to whatever /dev/input/event* the tablet is actually mapped to) doesn't work, and I can only get position data using Python's Xlib bindings. It also does not show up as a joystick in Pygame (my laptop's accelerometer does, though), which would have been nice.
It turns out that Hall Effect sensors weren't the best idea. First of all, they are latched. This is easy to work around, but the fact that they are dependent on orientation isn't. One of the guys at Noisebridge suggested we just use conductive pads on all the fingers, while the pad on the thumb is charged. Nate and I had thought of this before, but for some reason had dropped the idea. By the end of the day I had contact sensors for each finger working using aluminum foil and tape.
Taking into account the easy with which this solution was put together and the simplicity of handling the data with the Arduino, we'll be changing our design to use conductive fabric and thread (probably modifying the gloves we already have, rather than getting a pattern and sewing our own gloves).
We are looking at the various types of fabric offered here: http://www.lessemf.com/fabric.html.
Noisebridge already has conductive thread, so we'll probably be using that. If we need to get our own, though, we'll purchase it from SparkFun, where we bought most of our other parts (our first order shipped incredibly fast, and the packaging was very nice. We have been keeping most of the components together in the red SparkFun box that they arrived in.).
Nate (a friend of mine) and I decided to work together for our Senior Projects a while ago. After some brainstorming, we thought an awesome idea would be to build a motion capture or gesture input glove. We discussed various ideas for how we might accomplish this, including cameras, resistive bend sensors, stretch sensors, and optical fiber (I hoped that as the fiber was bent, less light would remain trapped by total internal reflection such that a photosenor, an LED, and some calibration would allow us to measure bend. As it turns out, our mentor used a similar technique in the construction of a similar glove at the company for which he worked.).
We eventually scrapped all these ideas in favor of hall effect sensors. Although I only considered them because of an early idea for a glove which would only be used for typing, we decided that hall effect sensors would be perfect for the musical application which had become the main goal of the project.
The new idea is to design the glove specifically for music. Ideas for the interface can be found here, and our parts list (which might not be kept up to date during the project, but will probably be updated at the end to serve as a reference for others) is available here.
I'll be adding a section to the blog for this project, and probably a page for projects in general. We plan to blog the project as we go, so to my maybe one or two readers, check back!