Summer Project: Get Ready

Readers! I have a big announcement. I've decided to embark on a big summer project! Does that mean there won't be any songs of the day for the next while? Yes. Does it mean something much better is coming? Also yes. Here's the catch: I won't tell you everything at once! I'll keep you one step ahead of where I am in the project, of course with pictures and eventually video to complement it. I'll even throw in a few song links at the end.

By now you're probably wondering what I'm talking about! Here is all the gear I need and have acquired for this phase of the project:

Sorry if it's a little low-res...I took it on my iPod. This is my lab! Yes, it's also my living room. But let's talk about what's in the picture. If you're still wondering, that is in fact a bear riding a shark on my screen. The left side's much more important though. I've got soldering gear, pliers, jumper wire, a breadboard, 10k Ohm resistors, a 6-foot USB cable, an Arduino microcontroller, and a 3-axis accelerometer. The square thing just below the pliers is the microcontroller, and the little speck beside it is the accelerometer. The latter is slightly smaller than a quarter.

Now to clear up some terminology. Soldering is the process of melting a tin-lead alloy onto a pair of wires to form an electrical connection. A breadboard is a pluggable circuit board used for circuit prototyping. A microcontroller is like a little programmable computer processor capable of sending and receiving digital and analog signals to external devices (the accelerometer) while interfacing with computer hardware. An accelerometer measures acceleration in 3 dimensions of space, including static acceleration due to gravity. It's what makes your Wii-mote know how you're moving.

How and why do I have all this futuristic junk? Well, I'm not a total layman...I have some robotics experience beyond the Robotics/Youtube club I ran in high school! That's right, music and computer science aren't my only interests. I'm going to assemble and program these parts into something pretty awesome! Of course it's not irrelevant to Rhythm & Bass! It will involve music in a pretty big way. First, I have a lot of testing to do.

The next step: I'm going to connect the accelerometer via SPI connection (don't worry about it) to the microcontroller, which I will connect to my computer by the USB cable. The goal of this is to read data from the accelerometer into the computer.

Stay tuned for updates! I'm doing this project in my spare time, so it should take a couple days to get this wired up. I'll fill you in as soon as Step 2 is done! Step 1 was getting the parts. You missed that one. My fault. Here's a couple track links! Enjoy!