Loom: Update 7

This week I made a lot of progress with the loom, which is good since the show is only 2 weeks away, and dress rehearsal less than 1 week away.

I got it all set up on the ITP floor, got my sensors hooked up, and am spending this next week composing and figuring out my performance.

I was experiencing a drawback with getting the wireless accelerometer data into max/msp, but finally ironed that out a minute ago; the WiTilt 2.5 from SparkFun is a great little device, but there are some pitfalls to watch out for, which caused me many hours of frustration. Here are some tips:

- after you connect to the WiTilt over its serial port, make sure you hit the onboard reset button twice. Only after doing this was I able to get into the config screen from zterm (or terminal) in order to set the device up.

- when you configure the WiTilt, make sure the data is being sent out as 'raw data'. This will send everything out as ascii.

- once you are in max and connected to the WiTilt's serial port, don't forget that you won't be seeing the config screen (unless you are printing the incoming data after sending it through the atoi object), so just trust that after you hit the reset button twice and start getting a string of characters (which should be the config menu converted to dec values), you need to send a '1' character (49) in order to get the data stream started.

- conversely, send a spacebar character (32) to stop the data stream

- the best way to parse out the values you want from the data stream (which will be coming at you in ascii as something like X=392 Y=772 Z=857), is to use regular expressions. I configured my WiTilt to only send me values along the Y-axis, so i was getting a continuous stream of Y=553 (or whatever current reading was). I pulled that data in from the serial port into max, converted the ascii to an integer (atoi), and then used the following regular expression with the max regexp object to get the sensor value: ([\\d+]*)

That regex will take all the numbers out of the incoming serial packet and append them one after another, thus giving you a complete sensor reading (instead of giving you the reading as individual numbers. i.e. 583 coming to you as 5, 8, 3).

The thing that screwed me up the most in the beginning was forgetting to hit the reset button on the WiTilt. I'd sit there insanely frustrated, wondering why the config menu wasn't coming up. Unless I missed it after reading the datasheet a million times (which is still possible I guess), it's not noted by SparkFun that you have to do this. So when in doubt, hit the reset button!

Okay, so the other problem was my stretch sensor wasn't giving me values. That was just a result of a bad connection on the breadboard.

Other things that I have to do is size the yarn. Because it's wool, it's sticking to itself, so to speak. Wool fibers are composed of gazillions of tiny barbs that hook onto each other (which is why felting exists), and to get around this, you need to 'size' your wool, or soak it in water and elmer's glue, basically. One of my upright beams warped and cracked as well, so that was unfortunate.

So for next week, the plan is:

- build a stand for the loom (so it doesn't have to lean up against the wall)

- size my yarn

- compose

- implement xbee circuits so i can transmit sensor values wirelessly (although this will probably not be the version I use in the show, just in case something screwy happens last minute. Wires are much reliable)