Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 7)

A good few weeks.

Week 202-203 saw me in Berlin for Loop – Ableton’s gathering of music-makers. I include it here as it was, for me, somewhat work-related: my practice has been orbiting around audio and music for a while, and I wanted to spend some time devoting brainspace to that – and meeting other musicians and creators. It was both a rest and a kick up the rear for my head, and that was ideal.

Whilst I was in Berlin, Richard was playing Twinklr on Radio 3’s Open Ear. Great validation to have an instrument we’d built played in live performance.

Work over this period of time had a few main focuses:

• Moving some prototype features of Selworthy into beta, and fettling some existing functionality
• Working on some project documentation for Good, Form & Spectacle
• Making a concerted push on Longcrag – a hardware development project of my own. The final output of Longcrag will, I hope, be some DIY kits for amateur musicians; in the meantime, I’ve sent the latest – hopefully final, but we always say that – revisions of the PCBs and Panels to OSHpark for manufacture. I’ve also spent some time on Octopart hammering out BOMs to help with costings and estimates; Octopart has proven to be a lifesaver. I’ve also begun thinking about documentation and packaging, though that still feels very hypothetical. Still, worth pushing end-to-end on something, so on the days I can spare for it, that’s where my head is.

It feels like a struggle sometimes, juggling all these different things, but when I write it down, it feels good: some product development, some client work, and pushing all these things forward. That’s a useful value of weeknotes, however late they are: being able to somewhat objectively quantify what I’ve been up to, and realise that the balance – whilst still fragile – isn’t as far from where I’d hope as I might think. Onwards!

When I’m busy, there are loads of reasons that there’s not a lot to write: sometimes, I’m mid-flow, and there’s not much to say or show until I understand the problem better; sometimes, because I’m so busy my capacity for writing is spent before I get a chance to write weeknotes; and sometimes, for simple reasons of client confidentiality.

So there haven’t been many worknotes recently. I even missed week 200! I think I’m going to have to find a way to build weeknotes back into the schedule as well as the practice.

In the meantime, some notes on the past few weeks:

• I’ve been head down on an intense project with Good Form & Spectacle – lots of prodding both data wrangling, D3, and the intricacies of SVG arc syntax.
• I’ve been continuing to work on prototyping a new feature for Selworthy – lots of wrangling of ffmpeg and image generation to surprising results.
• and I’ve been beginning to think about some personal product development work in the run up to Christmas – getting ready to stare at EAGLE and C programming again.

I’m going to be in Berlin briefly this week, between the 3rd and 8th of November, if you’d like to say hello – more in an upcoming post.

Lots going on, so weeknotes in haste:

I spent about half this fortnight working on some new features for Selworthy expanding on our speech-to-text functionality; this led to some new features still in the prototype stages, but that already seem pretty promising. Some rough edges to be solved in Week 197, but a good feature out there.

I also started work on a more complex feature that involves spinning up a new web service, as well as extending another. As a result, much of the programming work hasn’t been so much ‘typing’ as ‘pacing and thinking’ – working out how all these boxes will talk to one another, and when. It seems like I’m not typing enough – and then I come to the typing and realise all the thinking was the real work, and has paid off. That feature’s going to take a little more pacing, but so far, it’s proceeding well.

Three more days in week 196 with Good Form and Spectacle, which I started spending writing a pile of code to denormalise a lot of database dumps into large JSON objects, and ended exploring those objects in our Elasticsearch cluster. A chunky bit of work that, along with the work done by my other colleagues, sets us up to explore and describe this information.

I’d have done more in Week 195, but I was laid low by a cold that turned a flexible, easy end of the week into one mainly spent asleep; illness is a frustrating thing when one’s freelance, and I was lucky I had the space to cushion that impact; understanding clients also help.

Back on the bounch, though, and so onto Week 197.

Nearly a month of weeknotes – gulp – but a month that’s easily summarised.

The main focus of this time frame was bringing Holmfell into land and getting it over the finish line. That all went well, and it was feature complete by the beginning of September – at which point I went on vacation for just over a week.

I returned to find it still alive and well, with almost minimal fettling required before its official launch. That came with the opening of Bedlam at the Wellcome Collection – and I’ve written more about Empathy Deck, Holmfell as was, over here.

I spent some time in week 192 helping Spitalfields Music (on whose Programme Advisory Group I serve) with some interviews for their Open Call brief.

And finally, in week 194, I also began a new project with the team at Good Form & Spectacle, which will take me through much of October. Big, complex, and lots to wrap my head around, as ever. More to come there, I’d imagine.

Busy, busy, lemon busy.

Week 187 was spent on leave, which was much appreciated, before returning into Holmfell.

In the past three weeks, Holmfell has really come a long way: from Times-New-Roman debug screens to something that’s alive, making illustrations and talking for itself. (Gosh, it’s going to be much easier to talk about this when it’s in the world).

It’s an art project that generates media artefacts, and whilst a lot of the process has been about writing the code to build those objects, almost an equal amount is the part of the iceberg that’s beneath the water: code to filter content we don’t think’s appropriate, code to behave as a good citizen of the internet, code to comply with API rules and rate limits, code to make it easier to be controlled and monitored by the team.

And then, just when I’m up to my eyeballs in monit and Ansible and configuring servers, I pinball back to making prose-generation and phantomjs play ball. The project, as with so much of my work, touches lots of the stack.

It’s also a bit of an intense burst of work, which is perhaps why weeknotes have fallen by the wayside. But suffice to say: still here, still beavering away. September sees Holmfell launching, a proper holiday away from screens, and then getting into the swing of a project that’ll fill up my time in October, alongside other responsibilities.

As ever: onwards.

Properly back into the saddle now. There are three main focuses of work for me right now:

We’re nearly wrapping up a big push on Selworthy. In the past few weeks, the dev team have been shipping lots of significant improvements that are really rounding the project out. Meanwhile, I’ve been pushing forward on a few little R&D projects that are making their way into the tool as demonstration features, focusing on some speech-to-text integration and also using PhantomJS to generate 1080p files for compositing. Both experimental features have turned out surprisingly well, and are hinting at future opportunities. It’s becoming a really well-rounded product.

The boards for Staplehill arrived too late to take to Brighton Modular to exhibit, which is a shame – but perhaps it’ll give me more time to focus the product a little. Excitingly, assembly went entirely smoothly; it’s the first stacked-PCB design I’ve made. There were a few minor bugs in the PCB layout – notably, the point where I had the wrong voltage regulator – but nothing that got in the way of functionality. And now I’ve got a hardware ‘harness’ to build around, I can focus on testing and delivering the firmware, before revising the hardware. There were some issues that only emerged once the thing was assembled, and there’s a single huge feature that’s fairly important that is currently entirely absent – but we’ve got a starting point, and the people I’ve demonstrated it to have been very enthusiastic and positive.

And finally, I broke ground on Holmfell – an art project, which will take the rest of the summer alongside other work, working with Erica Scourti on a commission she’s received from the Wellcome Collection. That’s proving to be both interesting and challenging, but I’m already enjoying the collaboration and I think we’ll be able to navigate our way to an interesting outcome. So there’ll be more about that in the future.

I’m a little concerned when weeknotes slip – sometimes, it’s just because I’m busy, and after a long week the idea of writing them out of office hours isn’t always super-appealing. For me, the utility is not just the act of doing them, but looking back on them later. So there’s still value to handing in work late, as it were. I’m going to try to get back into some better patterns in the coming weeks, but balancing reporting/documentation with Doing The Work is important, and the former is taking priority a little at the moment. Busy is good, though, and hopefully that’ll continue.

Right: onwards.

photo by Felicity Crawshaw from Into The Wild, the MV Works showcase

And, after all the work of a gallery show and an install, the relative calm.

Week 180 was a long week, all about Twinklr: exhibiting it at Into the Wild. I spent much of the weekend with the box, and got to see a lot of people playing with it. It was a really great experience: some good questions, some lovely feedback from musicians and peers, but also a lot of people just playing it and enjoying it for what it was. I played it a few times as small performances during the showcase: once on Friday, effectively to myself, and then in a longer demo on the Sunday afternoon, and it turned out to be as playable and dynamic as I’d hoped. It was definitely best as a controller for more involved sound-sources – but Twinklr, a monosynth and a delay pedal led to some wonderful sounds and textures.

After the show, a breather.

I have spent the weeks after getting really stuck into Selworthy again to hit a next milestone for the project. Whilst I’ve been away, our new developers have taken that ball and started running with it, and the past two weeks have seen a great amount of progress – to the point that I’m mainly thinking about tech strategy and the odd feature, rather than being sole developer.

I made good progress with Staplehill: a personal hardware project that’s spun out of Twinklr and that I’m hoping to take to Brighton Modular. I’ve ordered the 1.00 circuit boards for it, and made decent progress on the firmware; it’s very much going to come together at the last minute – the boards arrive two days before I might be showing it – but if it does, it could be very good. Regardless, it’s a project I’m going to continue to pursue.

I spent and excellent day with Alex, Peter, and many excellent folk thinking about The Good Home in a workshop, which was a great boost for the spirits: good to spend a day to think, sketch, and challenge each other (and especially so after the hecticness of gallery install).

And, as ever, a spate of meetings and coffees, some casual catch-ups, others exploratory chats with new faces. Beginning to think about what’s next in my schedule, and to look for other projects. If you think there’s something interesting to be done together – be it consultancy, workshopping, or R&D and prototyping – then do get in touch. There’s work to be done.

Three weeks without a peep, and here we are: this is what I’ve been working on. You’ll be able to see it from Friday 10th June until Sunday 12th June as part of Into The Wild at Somerset House. I’ll be around for much of that time, so drop by and say hello.

The past three weeks have been a flurry of fettling, cutting, assembling, debugging and film-making. There’s not a lot to say today; in the next few days, much of that work will become public, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

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!

A week spent on Twinklr – most of which was spent on rewriting it.

Or, rather, rewriting the software. It turns out that lovely as the browser-based prototype is, Chromium on a Raspberry Pi just isn’t up to snuff, performancewise, with everything that’s going on – especially when you’re trying to build an instrument with low perceived latency.

I’ve been rewriting it in Processing. Processing is a surprisingly good fit: it had just been formally announced for the Raspberry Pi, has built-in support for Sound, MIDI, and the hardware GPIO pins; everything I need. Also, although Java is by no means my forte, I have used Processing in anger before – Spirits Melted Into Air was entirely written in it.

Progress was reasonably quick: it is, after all, another curly-braces language, and I’ve written a lot of the logic already. A lot of what slowed me down is idiom, and building the interface; the graphics and sound production are reasonably straightforward, but the GUI is more verbose. I’ve been writing it in ControlP5; I said to a friend it’s not so much 2000 lines of Processing, as 1000 lines of Processing and 1000 lines of ControlP5. The GUI library is that verbose.

No plan survives contact with single-board computers, alas. It turns out that Processing on the Raspberry Pi simply refuses to support the Sound library – the Sound library is currently only compiled for 64-bit processors. Even though the Pi 3 has one, it’s a bust. So I rewrote the whole thing to use Minim (and then rewrote it again to use Minim in a different way, as the first was a no-go on the Pi thanks to the vagaries of Javasound). This time, I found it refused to play back out of anything other than the horrible PWM analogue output.

Suffice to say: I am tired of Javasound errors, and next week, I’m probably rewriting the sound playback code in my third Java sound library of the project. But: the GPIO code is working well, and the graphics performance is very snappy. I think the rewrite’s been worth it.

I also took the time to stop rewriting the same old features, and build a new one that I have been interested to experiment with for a while now. It turned out very well indeed, and leads to interestingly musical results.

Finally, I spent a day with some pens and pencils sketching and exploring the form of the object. I should probably have done this sooner, but it was worth exploring. In the crit at the end of the week, some of this thinking as revealed to perhaps be dead ends – but not all of it, and that’s good enough for me. It was good to spend some time thinking with my hands.

Not a lot to say for Weeks 170 and 171 – I was overseas, taking a break from the studio.

Is that ideal timing? I don’t know; I’m pretty busy, but there was no deadline that week or the week after; the busyness was at a constant background level. That, to be honest, is a good time to go away: time when my brain could do with a break, to take stock, and to re-energise myself on return.

So I did exactly that, and it was good: nearly two weeks over the Easter weekend of clearing out some cobwebs, changing gears, and getting some perspective back. And then, back to the work!

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!