Hey again! A LOT of things have happened in my life since the proect began (I randomly adopted a puppy, among other things), so I haven't had a lot of time to dedicate entirely to the project. Will most probably be able to dedicate more in a couple of weeks!
First days
So, the first time while waiting for my kit has been spent with doing some research on which tools to use, and how to connect everything into the BBB. Since my local SoftLab is closed until January 20, I decided to focus on receiving input from the plants to begin with. The first question was how to connect the electrodes from the plants to the Beaglebone Black, and while looking around for solutions to this I stumbled upon the wonderful Mileece who has been making plant music in a similar fashion for over 10 years! She is using electrodes connected to an amplifier, which convert the analog signals to digital. I have sent her an email asking for some tips, and I hope she'll get back to me! I figured I could just connect the electrodes to the ADC included in the kit, to use the digital signals as input to SuperCollider or PureData. I am not sure if this will be adequate, however, so I have been looking for other solutions to this issue, and I found the following:
OpenEEG is an open hardware platform which aspires to bring EEG to the masses, and has already developed a hardware prototype to recieve EEG signals! There are also some If I were to include this into the project, I would be able to receive EEG input from humans as well which would allow for brainwaves to be included into the generative composition! This would bring it all way closer to my initial vision! However, this is an extra cost of up to $400, and I currently have a very limited supply of money, so it would be preferable if the ADC would function well to begin with. This will have to reveal itself as the full kit arrives. Even if I have to build this thing I would be glad to do so - looks like a really fun project and who wouldn't want their own EEG?
The suit
I have also been giving the suit some though, about where to connect the smart fabrics, which microcontroller to use, and the general design of it. As I really enjoy design from a purely aesthetic perspective, I have been envisioning some different possible designs. This is currently a secondary manner, however, and I will look deeper into it when SoftLab opens up again!
How to connect?
How would I connect the digital input to the sound processors? Would I create some kind of MIDI controller to different factors of the composition? The human suit would definitely become a MIDI-controller, but I'm unsure whether it will be the best solution for the plant music. Probably it would be better to directy input the signals into PureData or SuperCollider. I will have to look deeper into which programming language will work best for this project, and start coding pretty soon!
So that's it for this time!
Light and love,
Nadal