Project Title
Velcro MIDI Jacket
Project Team
Junda Chen, Jeff Ma, Yudong Huang, William Black
One sentence that describes your project
A MIDI(Theremin) jacket that allows you to create, record and demonstrate your music idea as an instrument for synchronized acoustic and visual performances.
Video
Poster Image
What can you do with it?
When you have a sudden flash of music idea walking down the street, turn on the jacket and start recording the idea with the theremin attached in the front of the velcro jacket. The piece of music will be stored, and you can recreate the music when you came back home. You can also turn on the light strip and show off your music to the public.
How it works?
The jacket has three components: theremin, light strip, and the mini computer. The theremin is built on the Leap Motion, a gesture recognizer, that tracks the hand motion of your hands. The data will be transmitted to and stored at the mini computer (a raspberry pi) attached at the back of the jacket. When the light strip is on, the mini computer will also control the light strip to move in accordance with the hand motion. The higher the note it plays, the higher the active light will be on the strip, and vice versa.
Development Experience
Overall, the group works collaboratively and efficiently. We embrace each other’s ideas, cherish the time of development, and have good intra-group communication. All fantastic idea came after heated discussion (using velcro to modularize works, light strips with dynamic designs, etc.), and we all felt engaged in the discussion and pleased about the fantastic ideas and outcome.
Do we meet our goals?
Overall, the project meets our original goal to create this prototypical wearable theremin that allows the user to play with. The core functionality, theremin light strip, and programs, meet what we would like the theremin to do. There are certainly a few things we have tried and failed to deliver during the short period of time, including its wearability (raspberry pi), stability (connection between light strip and circuit playground), user experience (accuracy of leap motion sensing, software interface, instrument types). But we still think as a course project, we had a good prototype that people embrace and excite about.
Hurdles and Resolution
Challenge 1: Modularization. There was a period that we found it hard to separate our work because of the design of jacket, and that directly influence the progress in the visual effect development parts. After a heated discussion, we found that it was a good idea to use Velcro to modularize the jacket into different components, all flexible to attach and remove.
Challenge 2: Leap Motion on Raspberry Pi. Running Leap Motion on Raspberry Pi is a headache. We encountered hardware problem that burned out both of our available Pis. After getting standard hardwares and equipments, we limited system support, not to say huge power consumption. At the last moment, we give up on the wearable functionality and used a computer for the showcase.
Challenge 3: Light Strip and Data Transfer. Light strip and circuit playground turns out to be pretty hard to integrate. We spent a chunk of time to get the light strip work with the circuit playground, and a significant chunk of time to get the proper data transfer working alongside with the application.
Next Step
- Spend more time developing the Theremin Software Interface
- Develop our own infrared sender/receiver instead of using Leap Motion
- Improve the hardware connection of the light strip
Final Materials
- Velcro
- Amazon Sweat Shirt
- Leap Motion
- Ada Fruit NeoPixel
- USB Cables
- Computer (a Macbook Pro, since we did not get the Raspberry Pi running)
