Posts tagged as selworthy (page 4)

A good few weeks.

Selworthy‘s handover continues. I’ve been working with a sysadmin to really get the servers shipshape, and easier to build on for the future. That’s involved going over most of my Ansible scripts and updating them as appropriate. Fortunately, there’s been very little replace, and we’ve made steady improvements and additions. We’ve also really stepped up the monitoring and alerting. I’ve also been working on rolling some more bugfixes out to live environments, and assisting the new development team in taking over the product. They seem to be making good inroads, and I hope that’ll continue.

Twinklr’s also seen lots of progress. The end of week 176 saw the final crit for the project, and I buckled down to deliver an end-to-end demo there. That meant building up the electronics once the PCBs arrived and then cutting the case and assembling the whole thing.

There were some bumpy moments: I think I overreached a tad on the electronics, and there are some noise and power issues I need to resolve, but they were rough edges rather than complete blockers. By the crit, we had a working, standalone Twinklr, all boxed up neatly and transported in a flightcase. The crit went well: it was great to demo a fully working object, and now I’m focusing on sanding off the rough edges, and pull together an installation for the showcase in early June – where you’ll be able to see Twinklr in the flesh. You can see some of the progress right now over at the Tumblr I’ve been keeping during the project.

Also, if you’re wondering what Twinklr feels like to use: we’ve now got a film of the version we completed last year. The version I’ve been building for the past five/six months has several new features, and a somewhat different construction (not to mention one that’s entirely computer controlled) – but it shows the germ of the idea.

A really good couple of weeks for both my primary projects.

Selworthy has gone into deployment at one of its clients, which is hugely exciting: it’s taken a very long while to get here, but I’m glad we have. I’m hoping they get some good use out of it. I spent a moderate out of time deploying it onto their servers, fettling the install, and resolving some exciting issues unique to nginx.

As a result of the project moving into its next phase, I also spent some time beginning to hand the codebase over to new developers, and working with a sysadmin on handing over the administration of the standalone environment. That’s all going well, and all this should hopefully allow me to step back from the project – later than planned, but in a good place for the work.

And Twinklr’s in a really good place too. I began week 173 following earlier defeats by porting the sound library to Beads, and that’s been very successful. I managed to get everything running on the Pi, with audio out of the USB interface, and with no glitching or errors. Some simple round-robin code gives us a fixed 16-voice polyphony, which I think should be enough for most people.

I then continued porting the rest of the UI to a new library that, whilst not as fully-featured as ControlP5, is much happier on the touchscreen. And to cap it all, I implemented the MIDI output in The MIDI Bus.

By the end of week 174, the software was feature-complete, and all working on the Pi in a remarkably stable manner. On Sunday, I sat playing with Twinklr on my laptop, as it happily sent data over cables to an analogue synth on my desk.

This was hugely exciting because of how I felt. All of a sudden, I wasn’t wrestling with making it work, or wondering if it every would; I knew it did. And, as I fiddled with it, I realised I definitely wanted it off my laptop, and onto a desktop object I could put next to this synthesizer to play. For the first time, I really desired the finished object itself (rather than just desiring finishing it). That felt really good, and is some great momentum for the next week.

I also began laying out a rear PCB for the case. That’s going to be need to be sent off to have made soon, so I’m trying to finalise it, double-and-triple checking it, and working out what remains to be tested on the Pi.

Good progress, then, in a couple of busy weeks. But we can’t rest yet. Onwards!

And, just like that, I fell off the Weeknotes horse.

I think 166 weeks on the go, though, is pretty good going. I imagine the slippage began when we moved onto what were, effectively, fortnightnotes: the routine was beginning to disappear.

And as I get worse at something, I tend to try to push it under the rug. It’s often easier to try ignoring it and hope the problem will just go away, isn’t it?

It’s also a way of not drawing attention to other things: the fact that Selworthy has stalled a little, pending delivery; the fact that Twinklr has been occasionally neglected, or occasionally more problematic than I’d like.

But those things are all, really, part of the process. They’re part of the work. Weeknotes are about work, not success.

So let’s get back on the horse. Since early Feburary, what’s happened?

Selworthy has had a fair amount of wrapping up, as I bring it into land and hopefully, handing it on to a larger team. That’s involved fettling Ansible scripts and server deployments, solving minor bugs, adding a few tiny features that make all the difference to end-users. So that’s been good.

Twinklr has been lots of two-steps-forward and one-step-back. I should write more on the notebook about it – another place that’s not seen the updates it should. But suffice to say: the shape of the project has surprised me at times, and I’ve not always been good at handling that surprise.

The CAD work and hardware has largely gone very well – except some simple oversight and confusion on my part mean that the object doesn’t quite, at the moment, fit together properly.

The software was all great, but it turns out the target platform really isn’t happy running that much stuff in a browser, and if we’re making a musical instrument, it should probably be snappy and responsive. So I’m rewriting it – in Processing, rather than Javascript. That feels drastic – a total rewrite – but so many of the hard problems have been solved already, and I’m now just re-implementing in a slightly different platform. It turns out it is going to have its own ‘exciting’ issues, but if they can be surmounted, then it was definitely the correct choice.

I’ll write a little more over the weekend on the Twinklr notebook.

And then, what else other than the two major projects?

I spent three days in Newcastle running a workshop for Northern Film with David Varela. Over the workshop, we took four teams of feature film-makers – each with a film in the can – and looked at how they could use the internet to promote, distribute, or do anything interesting with and around their film. Four great teams meant that the workshop went to lots of interesting places, and was really involved from all directions – everybody brought interesting, unique experiences to the table. It was a good reminder of how much I can enjoy that environment, too – it’s a while since I’ve done any teaching – and it’s started some thinking around a potential workshop I might run in the late spring. Thanks in particular should go to Roxy at Northern Film, and to David, for (as ever) being a wonderful workshop partner.

The electronics front has mainly seen tinkering – I think I’ve got a revision of Walton that solves some mechanical issues ready to send off – but there’s a potential project for later in the year budding, and occasionally being scrawled into notebooks.

And I think that’s it, for now: mainly, it’s been head down, working, or teaching, or thinking, and remembering that lack of forward velocity now doesn’t imply that that isn’t the trend in the longer term.

Last week put a lot of things in perspective, for me. We had a crit for Twinklr on the Friday, and I was nervous: here I was with nothing to show, hardware and software in pieces, and nearly halfway through. So I showed the decision-making instead. And it all turned out to be fine: several of us were despairing that the stage of the work we’d got to seemed to be further back than when we begun.

As we each said this, the others in the same place seemed to relax. Or, at least, realise it wasn’t just them.

This wasn’t failure: this was doing the work. We were in the middle of the project, which is when you are surrounded on all sides, and you just have to push through, and do the work. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like this, down here – but when it does, it doesn’t mean everything is terrible.

And that meant that it didn’t matter that weeknotes had stalled a little. What was important is that I just carried on.

Next week is week 170.

Twinklr is moving on very nicely. At the end of this fortnight, I wrapped up a first pass of rewriting the existing code. The music box now happily plays in a wide variety of scales, with any note selectable as root: that makes it much easier to play in key with other musicians, or to improvise around existing pieces of music. It already makes the whole thing much more instrumenty.

I also worked together a simple save/load mechanism with eight memories: the instrument stores not only the position of notes, but also the scale, root, and length of the stave, maing it easy to restore a state you once had.

And finally, at the end of this three-week period, I rewrote my code for spitting MIDI out of the device. There’s now a simple-to-use MIDI preference panel, making it easy to reload available inputs, alter the length of notes that you’ll send out, and a ‘panic’ button to reset all output. It’s really coming together.

Selworthy is being tightened into place for a new deployment: that means shoring up some minor issues, and lots of little improvements based upon user feedback. I’m also overhauling the code to make it easier to bring other developers into the project.

I spent a quick hour of lunch assembling the latest revision of the Walton PCB and we finally have a fully functioning version. I’m thinking about replacing one of the components – there’s some mechanical tolerance I’m not happy with – but now the whole shebang is working, it’s worth working out what to do next with the project: is it something to keep to myself? To open source? To offer for purchase as a kit? I might talk to some people about it shortly.

And finally, I spent some time tinkering with some electronics as a spin-off from Twinklr: exploring an aspect of its interactions and translating them to a slightly different environment. That involved first just breadboarding up some components to discover how they worked; this went surprisingly well, and I think I’m going to keep pursuing this angle of the project in odd moments.

Most of my weeknotes for 163-164 have already been published: over at the notebook I’m keeping for Twinklr, I wrote about the beginning of the year on Twinklr. Since the year began, I’ve pushed the code forward a fair bit, started to get to grips with some of the new materials and techniques I’m using, and getting involved with some of the other elements of the MV Works programme that go alongside our projects. We also had our first crit of our projects; it was great to get feedback from the other members of the cohort, as well as to see what they were up to.

I spent some time with the team on Selworthy, closing some minor issues, and beginning to implement new branding for the project. The client are beginning to really push taking the product to a wider market, and so I’m helping them along that journey.

I had a variety of interesting meetings: a debrief and presentation on a short piece of work I did with George at Good, Form & Spectacle just before Christmas, and a discussion with a potential new client around music and visualisation.

I spent a morning down at the Oubliette Adventure Shop helping fettle a final few technical issues before their launch weekend. The Escape Room is now open, and you can find out more about the game at their website.

I shipped off another revision of Walton PCBs to OSHpark, and should have v1.10 of that built by the end of January.

And I think that’s about it: I’m really beginning to settle into the groove of 2016, learning how to divide time between a client and the self-initiated funded work, and making sure the latter has the space not only to hit all its targets, but also to breathe a little. Onwards!

Last weeknotes for 2015!

The end of the year isn’t always quiet for me: I’m often pounding on until the end; may as well make use of all that time. And in some ways, this year was no different. There was various client work to wrap up, and remaining time to get Twinklr underway.

I added one new feature to Selworthy, altering the domain model to make it easier for the standalone version to handle multiple clients with different needs. Didn’t take long, but will definitely make it more useful even for internal usage. The tool is beginning to see internal usage in anger, which is great: the client are finding important issues much faster as a result, but are also seeing marked productivity gains that we hoped it’d lead to. As a developer, that’s exciting and rewarding.

I went over to Brixton to install Roshill for Oubliette: getting the electronics from the workbench into the room and the final enclosures. Mike and Dave gave me a good hand with this and, after some hairy installation moments, we ended up with a working puzzle. A quick board of pull-down resistors I’d built up beforehand made all the difference.

New PCBs for Walton arrived. I’d hoped these would fix the bug and in one sense, they did – but another bug still remained. I’ve now sussed what it is, though, and the only way around it is Ordering The Right Part. So I’ve got some 3PDT switches coming from Germany – along with some more equipment for the workbench – and we should have a final revision in early January.

I got inducted on the laser cutter at Makerversity, and put it to use. First, I built a test front panel for Walton; the good news is my new workflow for doing so works, and everything fitted. The engraving still needs some work, but I think it’s definitely going to be a goer for prototypes.

I also spent some time beginning to try fabricating some useful odds and sods for Twinklr. At the end of the year, I designed a test jig in Fusion 360 – in 3D – and then worked out how to bring it down to cuttable flat pieces, which I then produced. A big leap for me: CAD is not my natural environment, but now I can see how that workflow might work, and I know that one more thing in the project will be doable.

I rewrote the Twinklr software. Already? Well, it turned out that the Raspberry Pi wasn’t hugely happy with endless 800*480 Canvas rendering, so I rebuilt the code to render in SVG. This had lots of neat side effects: it makes a few new feature we’re interested in much easier, and it begins the ‘tidying’ of the code to make it easier to work on. It also makes a few other things easier – in particular, animation – which is always good.

On a less successful note, I spent a long while wrestling with Raspbian Jessie and USB audio, and am coming to the conclusion that before I spend any longer on it, I’m going to start again on Wheezy. The Pi is a frustratingly… idiosyncratic beast. I’m considering other options for Twinklr – not very seriously, given how suitable the Pi+Touchscreen combo is – but a day of messing around with Linux audio config really did make “not very” become a bit more seriously.

As ever, more Twinklr notes – and scrapbooking – are on the Twinklr Notebook.

And that was 2015. Yearnotes to come likely, but in the meantime: happy new year.

The penultimate weeknotes of the year – and late they are, owing to end-of-year busyness. But nontheless, what happened?

Selworthy continued with its lick of polish: I started tidying up some UI interactions, and tidying some features. I also got slightly sidetracked with an issue with Redis on one of our staging boxes, which ate some time, but was swiftly resolved thanks to the investment I’d put into Ansible earlier in the year. So that was a relief.

Roshill, the puzzle I’m building for Oubliette, moved forward quite a lot: we integrated the mechanical components (primarily stepper motors) and I debugged most of the electronic issues – much of which came down to needing some pull-downs, and ensuring the security of various connections. It’s nearly completed, and in the final weeks of the year we’ll install it in the space.

I spent a couple of days working on exploring some data and sketching in code with George over at Good, Form and Spectacle. An interesting few days; some careful exploration of a relatively small dataset led to insight from even the smallest of our interventions, and it was great to work with George again.

MV Works kicked off with the chance to meet the rest of the cohort and get a feel for the space and the project. Fun to meet so many people properly, and various plans have already started forming. I ordered some initial components to test my new hardware plans with, and also began planning an overhaul of the code. Oh, and I kicked off a Tumblr notebook for the project, to act as both a scrapbook of things we’re interested in and a place to store work in progress. I’ll no doubt continue to write weeknotes around it, but it’s also nice to just have a rolling scrapbook to post to.

Tangentially, I had an interesting Skype conversation with Dean Taylor. Dean wanted to sound out ideas around interaction design and sound production, and we ended up having a really interesting chat about all manner of things – but in particular, what I’ve taken to calling instrumentness; it was really handy as a way of framing my thoughts for Twinklr a little.

And finally: a studio move to fit around all that. I’m no longer in East London, but based out of Makerversity in Somerset House, just off the Strand. (I’m still with studiomates PAN, though). It’s a great space, and has wonderful facilities and people; looking forward to spending time there.

Two more weeks have pasted, which means two more weeks of contiguous weeknotes to write up.

I finished my first pass at Roshill – a puzzle I’m building for Oubliette Escape Rooms. Dave provided a second frontpanel for it, after the first had a few holes cut too small, and this one was much better. My new approach to wiring paid off, and by the end of Week 157 I’d wired the puzzle together and written most of the microcontoller code. I also met the mechanical engineer working on another critical part of the prop, and we worked out how we could piece our work together. There’s a second pass of work to come, but everything’s in a really good state, and it’s nicely maintainable – very easy to swap out individual components if they fail, thanks to an awful lot of spade connectors I crimped on.

My PCBs I ordered for Walton arrived, so I set about assembling one. The good news is that the PCB broadly functions correctly: I’d read the datasheets correctly, and the custom parts I’d had to make from scratch in EAGLE were all entirely correct. However, there was a significant flaw in the circuit (mainly to do with how negative voltage behaves) and so I’m going to need to take a second pass; I made my learning smile and moved on. Fortunately, some debugging (ably assisted with insight from James) solved the main issue.

I also took the opportunity to lasercut another frontpanel for that project. This too had some issues, largely down to my design process. I’ve resolved those by finding a workflow to get from EAGLE to SVG – namely, using the handy gerber2svg, which does exactly what you might think, and has the added bonus of being a command-lne tool. That’s all helped me have 100% confidence in the frontpanels from here on out. By the end of week 158, I had a second design of the PCB with the error corrected that was just about ready to send off for manufacture – although I have a sneaky feeling some last-minute tweaks (or even functionality) might be added before then.

Selworthy is gearing up to be handed over to new developers and deployed; I’ve been reviewing how some of its dependencies are packaged, and building out a secondary command-line tool to support it.

Most excitingly, I went up to Richard’s studio in Belper for a day of playing with Twinklr, filming and photographing it to document the end of the first phase of the project. It was by all measures a success; we got done what needed doing, but, more importantly, we lost ourselves in it. It was a joy to watch Richard just playing this instrument we’d built. After we had fixed a few minor issues and demonstrated basic functionality, we then plugged Twinklr into an analogue synthesizer I’d taken up, and thence into a long effects chain. And then I just watched as Richard explored and composed, writing patterns and melodies on Twinklr that played out on the synth, and the time just passed. A really good couple of days; I’m looking forward to sharing this project more properly with you in the immediate future.

Again, a quick flurry of notes to explain what’s going on:

• Selworthy has been called in to land, so we’re working through plans for that – how best to approach, what needs tidying up, and what the next steps are.
• Roshill is an electronic puzzle I’m building for Oubliette Escape Rooms and Adventure Society – their kickstarter has now been announced! I spent the two weeks sourcing parts, testing wiring and Arduino code, and after a fairly poor initial wiring layout, I’ve settled on something much more solid. We’ve also done a first prototype of the enclosure for it.
• I sent PCBs for Walton off to OSHPark for fabrication, after finally settling on routing – many thanks to James for input. I also took delivery of the first prototype frontpanel for it, which has already been made obsolete, but that also gave me some useful feedback on the Inkscape diagram I’d been using; really handy having Makers’ Café right down the road!
• I spent some time tinkering with ONN Studio, to help them explore some work.
• I popped along briefly to Hardware Coffee Morning; always interesting to see where other peoples’ heads are.
• And I spent a morning helping Good Form & Spectacle migrate some infrastructure to a more robust platform.

Lots of electronics at the moment, along with setting up future work and tinkering. Once the final burst of Selworthy kicks off, I’ll be knee-deep in software again, so in the meantime, good to have a concentrated period of time to wrap up these hardware projects. Onwards!

A fragmented fortnight, but lots of things moving in a variety of directions:

• Selworthy is in a holding pattern whilst we wait for a few pieces beyond my control to fall into place.
• Twinklr is pretty much at the end of its initial phase – some painting, staining, and filming to do – but there’s a possible future for it that I’ve been doing some work applying for.
• Roshill and Walton have had me staring into the maw of electronic component retailers: how many thousands of flick-switches are available? Now, it turns out, I know. I’ve been testing a variety of switches for Roshill, and Walton’s seen me staring at EAGLE, moving many things around a PCB as I test a variety of ideas.
• Lots of meetings – potential future work, catching up with peers; all very positive, and lots of things to chew over.
• And, to cap it all, I spent a pile of week 155 just being ill at home; much-needed bed rest made me functional again pretty fast, and saved the studio my sniffling.

Walton and Roshill will perhaps become more evident over time, but for now, they’re going to keep me ticking over. So whilst it was an interesting fortnight for me, there’s not a vast amount to report publicly. Hopefully that’ll change soon!

Week 152 saw my return to the studio after a week off, which was an excellent tonic after a busy August.

I spent much of the fortnight building a standalone environment for Selworthy. It was initially configured for an internal environment provided by one of its end-users, but my client wanted their own install to be able to demonstrate it and use it themselves.

I did this with Ansible. It’s a tool I didn’t know well at the beginning of the fortnight, but by the end, it had already proved its value several times over.

Ansible is a tool to help provision servers. It allows me to write small rules to describe the configuration of a server component, that will be idempotent – I can run them as many times as I’d like, and they either bring the server up to that configuration, or do nothing.

To begin with, it felt quite slow: prodding at syntax until the behaviour I want has been applied. I built the environment by building and destroying servers repeatedly, continuing to test that it’d work from a standing start. And each time I do that, the fact that all previous steps just work immediately becomes a huge advantage.

The other advantage is that Selworthy actually consists of two separate application – the main application, and a media-encoding tool – which have fairly similar system requirements. I built the Ansible playbooks for the media encoder first – which took a bit under a week of work. Then, however, it took about an hour to provision the main application server – because so much of the work had already been done and could be reapplied. It’s useful to be able to provision boxes so fast, and I’m definitely going to be continuing to use Ansible on future projects. The value isn’t just in the repeatability: it’s also in the ease of sharing it with other potential developers – guaranteeing that they can build the same environments as you. I’m not a great sysadmin, and it’s never going to be the main focus of my work, but the more controlled the environment I’m deploying to, the more confident I can be in it – and that’s a huge advantage.

By the end of the work, I could build the entire environment for Scribe in about ten minutes, from a single command, and then deploy each application to it in another single command. I was pretty pleased with that.

Around that work, I fitted a variety of other small pieces of work. I had an excellent chat with Holly Gramazio over coffee one morning, where she told me how Now Play This had gone, and we had a long conversation about the curation of games. It’s always valuable as a freelancer to be able to chat to colleagues, especially those at the edges of some of the spaces I work in, and Holly’s always a delight to talk with; nice to get out of the software for a morning, and hear about other friends’ successes.

I spent an afternoon at the Polyphonic Playground Lab, watching how musicians worked with the playground, and thinking about ways to potentially involve a much wider audience as part of the project. It was also a good opportunity to think about the intersection of music, sound and interaction design, which I’m thinking about a lot at the moment. That overlapped with the TouchOSC controller for Panoramical that I built the weekend before, as a small personal piece of tinkering.

Finally, I spent some time chatting with Richard about bringing Twinklr into land. We’ve got a plan of how to do that, which should fit around our life in the next few weeks, and an idea of where we’d like to take it next. As part of that exploration, I kicked off an attempt to rebuild it in Unity. As ever when porting code from something you know well to something less well, it can feel painfully slow at times, and as a result, I’ve only got code for drawing staves at the moment – but it’s a beginning, and something to build on. I’ve been thinking about a Unity build simply to make it easier to iterate on the real-time aspects of the code, and especially to consider more complex interactions that will become harder and harder to write in the browser.

Oh – and I took the opportunity, nearly six months on, to finally write up Rubato, another project Richard and I worked on together. As usual, project write-ups are always slower than I anticipate (and I still carve out a fair chunk of time for them), but I’m pleased with how that turned out.

A short week, 150. I spent it getting Selworthy to a point to hand it over to the client for inspection, before taking some time out of the studio.

That’s mainly involved confirming that everything works correctly in the deployment environment, which is being maintained by the client. There’s always a bit of back and forth involved here: even though I’ve done my absolute to recreate the live environment in a virtual machine, there are often rough edges that need sanding down, and by the end of the week, we’d got rid of all of them for approval.

I finished up on Thursday afternoon after a hectic week of fettling, and then left on holiday for the rest of weeks 150 and 151: time to recuperate and give my brain a break after a very busy August. Hopefully it’ll leave me rejuvenated for Week 152 onwards.

Still got my head down, which means we’re still on fortnightnotes for the time being.

Weeks 148 and 149 are the usual story: a variety of interesting meetings, keeping the Twinklr ball kicked up into the air, and taking Selworthy well past the inner marker on its landing path.

Twinklr’s firmly in Richard’s hands – he sent me some photos of a rough jig for the enclosure, which definitely felt right to me, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that moves on. I spent some time thinking about a particular possible spin-off for the project, which was an exciting change of direction.

I spent much of the fortnight deploying Selworthy into its new environment. That’s involved integrating with external authentication providers, collaborating with other developers on the configuration of its environment, and debugging issues with particular versions of libraries and packages.

Needless to say, all quite challenging. There’s a lot of context switching, between server administration, deployment, researching new versions of packages, and then writing application code to reflect those changes. Each context shift takes me a while to recover from, and so I’ve been working on my tenacity.

By the end of the fortnight, many, many moving pieces were settling into their final positions, with only the last bit of fettling left to go. Sometimes, this is what the work looks like – just pushing everything a little bit further forward.

A busy fortnight, bringing Twinklr to life, and pushing Selworthy along its landing approach.

Selworthy continues on its flight path, roughly in line with our plans and projections. The current work is to re-architect the project a little, so that it can live entirely inside a firewalled internal environment. Initially, we built it using web-based services, and so we’re slowly removing those. The main work there is building a secondary application to handle media encoding and processing, replacing Transloadit.

As a result, I’ve spent much of the past few weeks neck-deep in Sidekiq and Redis, to build asynchronous queues; in Vagrant, building up virtual machines to host the new architecture (in order both co get a better understanding of the live environment, and to take advantage of XSendfile); overhauling lots of tests, and finding out about the finer details of CentOS (as I’m usually a Ubuntu user). Lots to take on board.

And sometimes, that means diverging from the shortest route between two paths. The port to Vagrant began when I needed to serve the app through a real web server; that felt like a detour, and the days spent on it felt like a digression from my critical path. When I’d finished the work, though, it turned out I’d not only achieved the goal I was setting out to, but also derisked some later work. It felt like slowing down; in fact, it saved me time. So I’m reminding myself to trust my own competency: if I’ve made a decision, it’s probably a sensible one, and right now, sensible decisions trump fast ones.

By the end of these two weeks, the project is in a really good place: the new architecture works, is tested, and I’m more confident in it. I have a good map in my head for what’s coming next, too. So: onwards!

Meanwhile, Twinklr made some great progress.

The PCB manufacture I’d been exploring in the past couple of weeks didn’t turn out so well: due to various misunderstandings with the way Fritzing labels files, and some misunderstandings with drillbits, the home-made PCBs weren’t particularly satisfactory. On the plus side: I know they’re possible to build. However, I’ve explored getting some simple boards made – from the same layouts – with Ragworm, and look forward to seeing how they turn out. So despite my own PCB manufacture process not working out so well, it’s been useful to wrap my head around the design process.

Richard came down for an afternoon in Week 147. He brought with him the crank handle, attached to a rotary encoder, and quickly held together in a prototype jig. After some staring at a data-sheet, we wired the encoder into my circuitry, plugged into the tablet, and fired up Twinklr.

What happened next was we lost quite a lot of time in the best possible way. We spent a while just playing with the sequencer, tweaking and adjusting the code to fit the feel of the handle, and seeing what suited it. We spent some time sketching and discussing what the final enclosure will look like – something beautiful and very much like an instrument; I spent a while looking at pictures of the old RCA theremin (in which the instrument was also its own music stand, and designed like a piece of furniture).

I’m also using the Chrome Web MIDI API to let Twinklr control other instruments: we’re interested in how other musicians or performers might adapt it with their own work. I wired it into my Microbrute and we spent a good while seeing how the crank-handle sequencer felt attached to the analogue synthesizer; it turned out to be a great fit for a performative, tactile synth.

It was great to see the project coming together, even if we only spent an afternoon together. Very pleasing to feel it working, and to begin to see the opportunities and edges for what to do next with it. The next immediate step, though, is building it up, and I’ve given Richard all the electronics to explore enclosing it. Good stuff.

A busy couple of weeks, both on Selworthy and Twinklr.

This fortnight saw the last few features added to Selworthy before it goes into a period of deployment and re-architecting. Some were minor patches, but one overhauled the shape of the permissions system somewhat. A combination of diligent QA and automated testing helped there. It’s in a pretty good place to be taken forward into its production environment now – which is going to be my main focus in August.

I also spent a while building up the user-facing documentation for it in Zendesk. Selworthy is a complex tool; whilst we’ve tried to make it as intuitive as we can, clear documentation (especially around the various user roles) is also an important deliverable: once that reference is available, we can help users on the path to mastery more easily. Rather than writing it as a long swathe, we’ve been building it inside a “knowledge base” tool. That’s been really useful: it makes it easier just to hyperlink between articles, rather than duplicating information, and the shorter chunks make it much easier to rewrite over time.

Twinklr’s going well too. I went along to the Hardware Coffee Morning to have a chat with peers and show it a little; ironically, I mainly showed the software component of it. That’s pretty much where I’d like it to be for the time being, so the next thing is getting the hardware to 1.0 too.

That was the focus of week 145: I finally began the process of manufacturing self-etched single-sided PCBs. Whilst these are still relatively simple, they’re a step away from stripboard and jumper leads, and it’s been a useful thing to learn. By the end of the week, the layouts for the very simple Teensy breakout and less-simple amplifier were complete in Fritzing, and I’d managed – after a day of varying all the variables – to etch a single-sided PCB to my satisfaction.

I’m using toner transfer to make the etch mask: print an inverse of the mask on glossy paper with a laser printer, line it up with the PCB, and then iron it for about six minutes; the toner comes off the paper and ends up on the PCB. Then, fifteen minutes in a ferric chloride bath, and the copper all etches away – apart from where the toner covered it. Frustrating the first few times, but I found the knack in the end. I think the next project after this might involve getting double-sided boards manufactured – but a combination of time and availability has meant that DIY has been the way ahead. Very satisfying to spend some mornings in the workshop, too, rather than at a desk.

Next week, I’m going to drill it, solder it up, and do the same for an amplifier board. That should take very little time – leaving the rest of my capacity to go on to pushing Selworthy through to launch.

Fortnightnotes are becoming a bit of a habit, it seems. That’s partly because I’ve settled into a bit of a routine on Selworthy, so there’s not always that much to mention – and at the same time, I’m moving at a fair pace, so it’s been hard to squeeze them in. Let’s fix that now.

In the past few weeks, my main focus has been on adding a few new key feature to Selworthy. Most of these have slotted in reasonably well, and we’re inches away, it feels, from being what we think of as feature complete. As well as bringing the 1.0 in to land, we’re thinking about re-engineering parts of it for deployment in its intended home, and what the future life of the product will look like.

I spent a day in week 142 tinkering on a WordPress installation with Matt Webb, moving it to a new home, upgrading it and fettling it a little; a day of gentle pair-sysadminning, carefully working through a list of tasks and double-checking them. It was a pleasure to catch up with Matt, as ever, and we made good time on the work.

I’ve also pushed Twinklr a bit further forward – mainly in terms of planning out how I’m going to manufacture a few single-sided PCBs to keep its innards tidy – and started the process of acquiring tools and materials to launch that into the world.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve continued chipping away at the Selworthy featureset, exploring minor additions that might have significant value. That’s not always been successful: sometimes, the material just won’t quite do what I’d like, and that’s meant returning to the drawing board a few times. But I’ve had enough successes to push forward, and at the same time, we’ve begun exploring both a deployment of the product and potential futures for it.

There’s not a lot more to say really, other than yes, it’s continuing, and moving forward, and I’m into a bit of a routine with it.

Meanwhile, Twinklr has leapt forward as I’ve managed to get the prototype code up and running on a tablet. We’re actually using a Windows tablet for this, simply because we need to support USB HID devices, and, ideally, run the code locally; given all Windows tablets are running Actual Windows, that seemed like the best fit for the project. Initial results are promising; I’ve had to remember how to write batch files – something I’ve not done for over a decade – but it’s as satisfying on a touchscreen as I hoped. Richard and I have planned out the work we need to do to hit our first ‘official’ milestone, and it’s all very doable: he’s making good progress on the aesthetics and mechanics of the project, and I’m hoping to meet him in the middle with working technology.

Very quick weeknotes this week, so let’s break out the bullet points:

• Selworthy hit the milestone we were aiming for, wrapping up a list of key features. There’s still a long backlog of ‘wants’, though; some are large and monolithic, but I’ve got some space to start implementing some smaller features, so I started rattling through those, alongside continuing to think about deploying the application.
• An interesting meeting on Tuesday about a project bringing a digital component to an installation piece focused on music, performance, and audience participation. A good session, and hopefully more to say there soon as it takes shape.
• A brief piece of experimentation in a spare moment hacking on Twinklr, exploring Chrome’s Web MIDI support. That turned out very well, and so again, something to show off in the future! For the time being, exciting to play with browser technologies talking to the outside world without ridiculous plugins or other interventions.

The usual pattern of the week – primarily Selworthy, coupled with a few personal projects or trickling future work forward – was broken up this week with a couple of days workshopping with Max and Mike from After The Flood. Productive, interesting, and challenging as ever.

Selworthy continues to be in a strong position: we’re wrapping up a few very last features before we get ready for deploying it for a client.

And Richard and I continue to chat about Twinklr. Lots of interesting discussion points, from player pianos to modular sequencers this week, and lots of new images shared to our moodboard on Pinterest. We’re at the phase of the project where the more ideas and diversions, the better: we’ll start narrowing things down later.

A short week after returning from vacation, but a decent amount to note down.

Selwothy had a pilot run, being given to real users to work with, and I’ll find out more about how that went in Week 138. It seemed good, though – no code errors, lots of work put through it. I spent the two days that the pilot ran for wrapping up lots of minor issues on the snaglist, and a few items on the client’s wishlist. The hands-on attention its had from the end users in the past few weeks has really helped tidy up some rough edges. As well as going over the wishlist, I also started planning out a next potential phase of work for Selworthy.

Friday was largely given over to meetings: lunch with George from Good Form & Spectacle, an ever-useful chat with Tom Taylor from Offset, and then catching up with Richard over coffee about, amongst other things, Hensbarrow. A nice way to end the week.