Thursday: The Little Fixin's

Today wasn't so much about making the next big step in the Chord Board evolutionary track. Today, at least for me, was about tying up some of the loose ends of the documentation and some troubleshooting of the MMCB itself.

On the side of tying up loose ends, we had to replace a few scenes of B roll for the MMCB promotional video. I cleaned up the interview footage we took and pieced it together into a nice little sequence. We took new footage of the MaKey MaKey Chord Board in use. Then it was on to color grading and editing,  which I find really amazingly powerful. Color grading can do some amazing things to make your film look accurate or as stylized as you could possibly imagine.

As for the troubleshooting side of things, we move to the MaKey MaKey and its integration with the Arduino editor software. A problem we've encountered for a while is the very fast re-trigger time on the buttons (inputs) of the MaKey MaKey. If we don't lift our fingers up quickly from the scale degree or inversion buttons, they will begin triggering their functions in a very rapid loop.    This had become tiresome to deal with, so I set out to "de-bounce" the hardware inputs on the MaKey MaKey. 

De-Bounce? Yeah, that's the term for basically setting a small delay between sensor input and performing the assigned task. Basically, the inputs sense our fingers very rapidly when the circuit is completed. Now, the MaKey MaKey senses "on" and "off" by way of voltage. Completing the circuit with a finger brings full voltage to the wire and the input on the MaKey MaKey, full voltage equals "on". When we release a finger from the button, the voltage drops down to zero, this equals "off" in the MaKey MaKey's logic. This isn't all of the story though. When a button is pressed, the voltage doesn't go all the way up instantly. In fact, the voltage "bounces" up and down from zero to full a couple of times before settling to a specific value. In order to stop confusing the MaKey MaKey, we have to write a "de-bounce" function. This will instantiate a small time delay between the pressing of a button and the carrying out of the action associated with the button. This delay only has to be a few milliseconds, enough to let the voltage settle down, but also quick enough that we don't notice a tactile delay when using the MMCB.

I'll be taking home the Makey MaKey Chord Board tonight so that I can work with the arduino code to implement this function into the firmware of the MaKey MaKey. Fun times ahead! I'm starting to bridge the gap between programming language and the physical application, i guess i'm realizing that computer language should be though of in the sense of real world functions. That's making it a bit easier for me understand, at least. 

Tomorrow's Friday once again so, happy Friday in advance!

Have a good night.