Theory vs. Practice

In theory, a flex sensor is simple. It is just a bit of resistive material, like anti-static plastic sheeting, sandwiched between 2 bits of copper laminate and squished inside some heat-shrink tubing. There are many things that I would like to build of of this. First up as a prototype is building flexible antennae for an Atari Punk Circuit to modulate the sound based on how they are moved about. Then I want to make a suit out of them at all my major bendy points and route them through a Freeduino into a MIDI to have an instrument suit. I think it'll be neat to be able to make roaring bass lines just by waving my arms about wildly, which is how I normally dance anyhow.

In practice, however, securing the copper laminate has been more difficult than expected. Turns out there are a lot more different types of copper foils than I had ever expected and I'm not sure exactly which one would suit my purposes best. And while we're on practice vs. theory, it turns out that Ethernet cables are much easier to make into complex braids than 16G aluminum wire. While a 4² braid of Ethernet does look cool, it is not a torc.

With a What?

For the hackerspace, I send out a lot of emails. Most of them get ignored, but some of them stick. One of the ones that got a reply was a request to tour a museum collection of rare and antique musical instruments that the university's music school owns. In one of the conversations we had with the outreach director of the collection, we decided that co-hosting an educational event that melds technology and music into a workshop for kids and their parents would be an excellent idea. This is what is referred to as a Make and Take, particpants register, pay a fee for parts, come and get taught how to make stuff, and then get to take it home with them afterwards.

So, like a good engineer scientist (hacker?), I started thinking about what kinds of musical/technology projects we could conceivably build in a few hours. A while ago, Abel Pharmboy, a fellow science blogger, scientist, and musician linked me to the trailer of "It Might Get Loud" which showed Jack White of The White Stripes making a primitive electric instrument out of a 2x4 plank. This got me thinking about what sort of materials an instrument pickup could be made out of with the eventual thought of making a plank guitar. The potential for a Make and Take with the music museum gave that notion impetus, so tonight I built a 2 string electric slide guitar.

Figure 1: It's not exactly science, but it does make noise!

I used a 1"x4" plank, the voice coil of an old telephone (has lots of 42G copper wire), some nails, a set of nickelwound guitar strings, 6 screws, and a glass bottle of Nantucket Nectar juice which was quite tasty.

Humbucker construction:
A humbucker is a type of electric guitar pickup that transforms the vibrations in the strings into an electronic signal. It is an electromagnet that projects a magnetic field perpendicular to axis through which the guitar strings vibrate when plucked, which induces a current. Some commerical pickups have a separate magnet for each string, and some have 1 rectangular magnet stretching under all the strings at once. I chose the latter option, and since most commercially used hardware is ferromagnetic, I figured I could use the dry-wall screws as the core of my pickup.

I began by trying to solder the 4 screws together. Turns out that silver-core solder doesn't stick very well to cold hard metal alloys regardless of how much I'd have liked it to. So I used some 20G copper wire on hand in the hackerspace to bundle the screws together. Next I tried to solder (stubborn-ness) the bundle of screws to an improvised Dremel bit to help me wind the 42G copper wire from the telephone voice coil around my ferromagnetic core more easily. This also didn't work. I wound up making a handle out of hemostats and hanging the voice coil like a spool from my soldering helping hands and winding it by hand. I got sick of this after 2h and decided the thick belt of copper wire now girdling the screws would suffice. Finally I soldered leads to the ends of copper wire (the trailing end and the beginning end that I left sticking out) and soldered that to the leads on a 1/4" audio jack someone gave to me. When I plugged it into my amp, it made clicking buzzy sounds, but this was expected since there weren't any vibrating metal objects nearby. I tried to simulate one by banging a stainless steel bowl around near it, but this doesn't work as stainless steel is a crappy magnet and it was annoying the other people present.

The guitar:
When I embarked on this phase of the project, I immediately regretted that the hackerspace doesn't have a T-square yet so I don't know if my lines are even close to even. Nonetheless, I began by plotting out a point near one end of the plank and nailing an E and D string through their winding holes to the board with skinny nails. Then I played with the placement of the glass juice bottle as an acoustic resonator and bridge and decided that about 4.5" was good for tension. I used 4 nails to create a little cradle/fence that keeps the bottle in place while also laying it flush against the plank.

Creating functional tuners was more difficult. I found 2 wood screws and tried to tie the strings around them to no success, hoping to be able to tune the guitar with a screwdriver. None of the knots stuck, they just rotated. I had expected about as much. So I hauled out the metal cutting bit of my Dremel and deepened one of the notches on the screw's head to be flush (made lots of pretty sparks that didn't start any fires). Then I filled the screw hole with molten solder and poked the end of the string into it and held it steady until it cooled, then used needlenose pliers to bend the string down to loop around the screw. This worked well, but since I had filled the screwdriver holes with solder, I had to use the needlenose pliers to tune, but tune I eventually did, with the supposed E string winding up tuned to a D2 and the supposed D string winding up as a C3.

The humbucker is stood up near the tuning pegs by 2 small nails.

Sound:
It's quiet. At least, it's quiet when it's plugged in inasmuch as it has a very low signal to noise ratio. Acoustically, it is surprisingly loud and was causing loose screws and nails to bounce about on the table surface when laid flat. I had to run it through a pre-amp with the volume boosts, EQ boost, and gain all the way up to get an appreciable signal out of it. But once I did it was loud and gritty with a very steely twang. It is a bit awkward to play, but that's part of what makes it cool. I quickly found the sweet tonal spots on the neck of the guitar and began to bang out simple rock and roll chord processions.

The signal is loaded with tones of natural distortion, so much so that hooking up my Boss Bass Distortion pedal didn't impact the tone or intelligibility of its done much at all.

What I Would Do Differently Next Time:
1) Use an actual magnet for the pickup core.
2) Find a way to wind the copper wire around the core mechanically instead of by hand.
3) Wax the wound wire around the pickup to give it some insulation from outside interference.
4) Mill tuner screws with holes through them to thread the strings through. Find a kind-of-flattened bottle to use for the resonator to decrease the necessary height of the strings from the board so I can also make a flatter pickup.

On Recognizance of Competence

Recently I had some business cards with my personal contact information printed up to help me network more effectively and remain in touch with the awesome people involved in science and technology that I've been meeting. As these aren't for work, per se, they have a picture of a Velociraptor skeleton, a quote from Mark Twain ("The more you explain it the more I don't understand it." A good reminder to keep things simple and short, I think), and "Awesome Scientist #17" as my job title, even though it doesn't signify exactly where I work. I'm not sure exactly who the other 16 are. About this time, I realized something: people think I'm smart. This is strange.

I don't know that I'm smart. I don't feel any differently and I cannot imagine being any other way. Frankly, most of the time I feel stupid because there is so much that I do not know and that which I have captured in my mind is so insignificant compared to how much awesome there is to learn. I only know that I am smart by interacting with other people and seeing the reflection thereof. I used to be more reclusive and introverted, counting bacteria by day (doing science) and making music alone at night, but now I have been forcing myself out of that bubble and taking on challenges and actually talking to real people*, doing SCIENCE in the new lab job, and dropping awesomeness and scientific knowledge through the informal molecular biology classes I've been teaching in the Makerspace (Youtube soon). Through all of this, I have come to realize that people actually value my knowledge, experience, perspective, and opinion. I have more opinions than anything else, but it's still a bit strange because I still feel as though I haven't done anything truly awesome that deserves any respect yet.

I probably never will. I realize this, because I know that my ambitions and analytical nature will never let me rest because there will always be more science and/or awesome always going up or something else shiny will captivate my interest. The positive side of this, I think (self-delude?) is that it'll keep me busy, and that's a very good thing as a bored Toaster digs out his backpack of tools and starts taking things apart. The other positive of this is that by taking on more, I hold myself to doing more and am forced to learn how to synthesize all the enzymes to help masticate all that I've bitten off. I used to read scientific papers for fun, but now my boss sends me papers faster than I can read them. I used to make music just for my own enjoyment, but after doing in impromptu live set I have been volunteered to make live music at an art show in 10 days (and all I have prepped are 2 remixes of the Leekspin song). I used to tinker using just my own limited tools and experience, but now that I've helped create a cooperative makerspace I have access to a much wider range of tinkerables and tools (I even coined a new term last week; making a silly, simple mistake now has the swear word: "BLOOTLELOOT!" attached to it after I mistook a diode for a resistor and soldered it to an LED). I used to play with data for weeks just out of curiosity, long after the main aim of the experiment had been answered, just to see what I could draw out of it, but now I have so many data sets to mine that pure play has transmuted into teasing the data for the prettiest results.

These are good changes. It was silly of me to ever think I should first know what I was doing before trying. This is much more informative.

*Not that bloggers aren't real people, but Internet-based communication is easier because it has a backspace key.

7 Kinds of Awesome Busy

I have been 7 different kinds of awesome busy lately, although at the moment exhaustion is chipping away at the thick layer of exuberance I've been smearing across my forehead lately. Please do not expect this post to be in chronological order.

Last Tuesday the flow cytometer I needed to get data was broken. So instead I went to Chicago and Milwaukee and drove back in the same night for the Two Hands Project. I also went to Boston for a week at the beginning of the month with absolutely no hotel reservations, just friends of my brotherfriend to stay with. There I met Prime*, who is awesome in 17-8,597 different ways and I'm 97% certain that I'm in love with her now and I can't help it and don't care except that there's a rather inconveniently large physical space between us (1Mm, too big for catapults!). We're trying to figure out how to fold the space between us into technical nothingness, so if you live between Michigan and Boston please be aware that there may soon be a sudden extreme change in the topography of your region. I'm sorry, Cleveland, but Prime sends me cookies and cookies > Cleveland, although it should be noted that I can be bribed with plane tickets now.

I did many other things in Boston, some of them rather unbloggable** now that I know my boss reads this site, but they include surviving biking through downtown Boston traffic with several kgs of computing and goggles and letting complete strangers surprise-dye my hair however they wanted to. They're not strangers anymore and my hair was a very lovely bright pink for about a week when it faded to a strawberry blonde. However, the purple sides did not fade nearly so quickly and now, even after buzzing away the unruly mop that needed trimming anyway, I have a subtle bright yellow blotch on one side of my head.

Regarding blog-reading bosses, I changed laboratories shortly before going to Boston and am quite pleased with the change. In Immunolab, I read papers to actually apply them to the science I'm doing and planning instead of just reading because I'm bored, and doing so matters(!) and this is also awesome even though it has also resulted in a drastic cut in how many PLoS Computational Biology articles I have time to read. I expect to find an equilibrium again sometime as I climb the learning curve.

But as for equilibria, that's been thrown even further off balance by trying to organize a local hackerspace. And that brings me back to the Two Hands Project, but only in a moment. A hackerspace is a place where creative awesome people can come to build their ideas, talk technical shop, imagine, invent, innovate, destroy and re-create whatever they want to. It's essentially a community in a common shared working space with shared tools and parts, and maybe even eventually club-like membership to buy those parts, that fosters creative productivity by pitting like-minded people of completely different backgrounds into their own creative passions. These emerging spaces have the potential to remodel the entire American economy by shifting innovation from closed-source company driven patents to fast and flexible open-source crowdsourced invention. So far we have computer programmers, musicians, roboticists, artists, biotechnologists, cooks, textilers, and other crazily awesome people coming to meetings and generating large numbers of incredible project ideas. However, forming this group involves a lot of email management, community outreach, calender planning, part sourcing, charter writing, agenda creating, etc etc etc and I for that I am grateful that I can rely on most of my friendfamily, who're also all embroiled in this.

And yes, I have a friendfamily that has coalesced. Sister Doom, Brother Discord, Brother Deliverance, and myself, Brother Destruction. These are people whom I can completely count upon to have my back, whom I can trust and who know that they can depend upon me as needed. Sometimes I want to kick Brother Discord in the face, but that's probably because he's also my roommate. Sister Doom and I drove to Chicago and back last Friday to pick up a stranded Brother Deliverance.

But The Two Hands Project is also awesome. As I understand it, Brother Deliverance first came up with the project when he found out that JetBlue was offering a $600 ticket that lets you fly as much as you want from September 8th to October 8th. So he put out a call for donations at http://www.twohandsproject.com and raised enough money for a ticket and people donated equipment, and 2 have even joined him on his bad dash from coast to coast. It was with him and his crew that I (politely and enthusiastically) stormed Pumping Station One in Chicago, went on to interview James Carlson (director of Bucketworks in Milwaukee), and then drove from Milwaukee back to Ann Arbor so I could be back in lab by 10am. Because Brother Deliverance et al are too busy recording footage, flying, and meeting awesome people across the country to keep up the blog at Two Hands Project, they've enlisted me to do it for them remotely. I posted the first semi-polished video from San Francisco's Noisebridge and The Internet Archive*** today here and will be posting a string of profiles of hackers/makers soon.

There're some sweet experiments coming up that I am very excited about, and I just realized that I forgot the slip of paper that has the part name of the low-voltage audio amplifier I wanted to buy from RadioShack tomorrow on my desk in the lab.

I'm not quite sure what to do with Atomic Pudding. On the one hand, I could just use it like I've used this venue and let my awesome shine through, but on the other hand I liked what I was doing with open-access research and interviews, but it was just getting absolute crap page views and as such I'm not sure I was doing very well with it. Thoughts?

I also went out to visit i3 Detroit recently (Wednesday night, I think?) and had mjaddra before that (I think?) after a local maker/hackerspace meeting that Brother Deliverance recorded for the Two Hands Project (I had a lapel-mic, but was probably still unintelligible) and invited them to the free Drupal Web Development class that our as-yet-unnamed space**** is holding this coming Wednesday. And somewhere in here I know I made some really awesome live music with a fellow maker/hacker at a meeting sometime that may have been last night but I can't be certain. Wasn't I in Boston last night?

*Whose intellectual and physical hotness are mutually inclusive and inseparable properties! In testiment to her awesomeness, note that she was the first person to ever convince me of the functional utility of buying clothes that don't need to be modded to fit and has even inspired me to replace the whiskey in my burritos-cookies-and-whiskey diet with vegetables!
**Get your mind out of the gutter!
***Technically not a maker/hackerspace.
****We're working on it!

P.S. - I don't recommend prying all the keys up off your keyboard and rearranging them from QWERTY to DVORAK before you know DVORAK very well. Makes passwords very difficult.