Start: 11:30

• Got the first simulation for the audio-tactile feedback system to work.
• The pressure sensors seem to respond very well and with some tweaking it can feel natural.  Pressure on the sensor makes the simulated number go down, touching the pad with very light pressure holds it at whatever position you are at, and releasing makes the number go up again.  It will be interesting to see how it works with more fingers.
• The sound module is extremely slow and there is no really good way to loop the track.  Longer samples will help reduce this issue.
• Tried both the 1W exciters and the bass shaker.  The bass shaker is a bit bulky which makes it not ideal for having multiple fingers.  It still might be cool to have this in the base of the next prototype to give you a thump when you make initial contact with a object.  The 1 W exciters put out a good amount of vibration with less sound.  The form factor of these will allow us to have more of them per finger and on the palm to give better feedback of which parts are touching.  I have not tried the 30W exciter yet.  It is also bulky but may be good for the center of the palm.
• Phil came up with a new idea to use the PC to produce the more realistic sounds like servo motors or collisions with object of different materials.  This would allow us to use whatever sound we like without having to worry about the vibrational properties of the tone.  It also allows for feedback of motion in free space without activating tactile vibrations that should only be used for touch.
• There are a few glitches that need to be worked out plus I took a couple of shortcuts to make testing easier.  Currently everything is in one sketch because it was quicker to smooth out the problems then if it was split into the appropriate classes.  It is also running autonomously at the moment with no computer interaction.  I will have to fix this to make scaling to a multi-finger prototype easier.

end: 7:30