Monthly Archives: May 2012

Tom 5.16.2012

Start: 10:00

  • Figured out how much room mounting the boards will take
  • Decicded that the preamps should go under the the main amps.  They will be attached to the other side
  • built one of the amps that came in the mail.  I will start testing the power supply tomorrow

End 6:00

 

Mike 5.16.2012

  • Production server backups
  • Completed some OCI training for TASC requested by Jim
  • The remote site admin got back to me.  He said he can’t reach the production but last month was able to reach the test site.  I asked him to verify he can connect to the test site then I will contact local server admins
  • Also sent an email to the other person who was having connection issues.  I haven’t heard from them since their local admin said he could connect just fine.  Hopeful the admin and user resolved everything and just forgot to tell us.
  • Started matching up data between PPM and COGNOS, asked Dong to come in tomorrow to help write a query

Phil 5.16.12

8:00 – 4:30 FP

  • The communications test ran all night and was still working and responsive when I came in. Time to make some sounds!
  • Fixing up the messages, and eliminating redundant/unneeded info in the Json packet – all done, and the data transfer seems much happier
  • Added clamping to keep volume and pitch from getting out of hand.
  • Moving the hardware initialization from SoundDataObject to SoundController. I think I’ll also explicitly set up the sound objects, at least for now.

Tom 5.15.2012

Start: 10:00

  • Worked on new schematics for electronics board.
  • It is going to be tough to fit everything on an atx board but I am pretty sure its doable
  • reduced the size of the three sensor circuits to be about the size of 1
  • Reorganized the preamp circuit so 5 can be closer together
  • Found 2/5 connectors.  Still have trouble finding elbow serial ports, ribbons were not as hard
  • Trying to figure out the best place for the power and ground to run.  Also need to figure out how to run the new leads to the arduino

End: 6:00

Mike 5.15.2012

  • Backups on the production server
  • Prepared some of the connection test document and troubleshooting, will have more to add to troubleshooting once we resolve something
  • Read up on how the network works, proxies, firewalls, pki, etc. to see what may be blocking some users
  • Updated my internal FGM resume
  • It works! I have a small gwt app that displays exactly when it was built, the svn version number, and who built it.  We can also add other fields as needed.
  • Need to turn it in to a library.

Phil 5.15.12

8:00 – 4:30 FP

  • Working on the SoundController class. Going to try out the basic mechanisms in the sandbox before trying them on the arduino.
  • Got the JSON key/value search working. Now I need to organize all the unique sound objects.
  • SoundController class is working in the sandbox
  • Meeting over at UMBC to go over SIGCHI
  • Have SoundController on the arduino and am currently testing.  If all fingers are updating data, the communication gets bandwidth limited. This is ok to work out the sounds, particularly on a finger-by-finger basis, but it will need to be optimized to keep the refresh rate up.

Tom 5.14.2012

Start: 10:00

  • Pitch bend is a little tricky to use.  The midi command is (0xE(channel), byte 1, byte 2) .  The two bytes are signed but negative values are not used so the range of each byte is 0-127(0x00-0x7f).  The two bytes combine to make a 14-bit number with a range of 0-16383, with zero being the most flat and 16383 being the most sharp.  This means to have no pitch bend it has to be set 8192.  And example of the three bytes sent for this command on channel 0 is (oxE0, 0x00, 0x40).  It is important to remember that this is not equal to 0x4000 but instead 0x2000 as the most significant bit of the first byte is dropped.
  • Decided to change the way I was designing the new board in a way to minimize making mistakes on things which are still working.  Instead of starting from scratch I copied the board.   Things will still need to be moved but at least the traces are already connected.
  • Phil suggested having the new board follow the atx form factor so it can be mounted in a computer case.  The area will have to be 24.5x25cm all output ports will be in the 16x5cm rectangle where the pc outputs are usually.
  • Using a computer case gave me the idea that we might be able to use a pc power supply.  The peak current is fine the only problem is the minimum current on the 12 volt is 1 amp.  I will have to do some tests when the new stuff comes in.
  • Measured and placed the mounting holes for the arduino on the new board schematics
  • Found some of the connectors which will be needed to use ribbon wiring for the arduino in the pad2pad tool.

End: 6:00

Mike 5.14.2012

  • Backed up the production server
  • Drafted a new timeline for deploying the VIS Tool with the final date of July 9th for full production (aprox. 2 months of connection testing and early adopters should be sufficient depending on connection issues), sent it to Jim/Tangie
  • Sent an email to the admin of the user who is having connection problems, hopefully he can tell me why he can connect and she cannot
  • Added classification markings to the vis index sites
  • Still playing around with maven and creating a webservice that returns the build date and SVN version number.  I finally have the date and version being placed in the manifest file correctly.

Mike 5.11.12

  • Stopped by the fort for a few hours in the afternoon, decided this would be a good time to move everything to production
    • Stopped the test server
    • Dumped all the databases to files
    • Moved the databases to production
    • Deployed the new index sites to production
    • Turned on the production server and all the tools
    • Created a redirect site for test to production
    • turned test server back on to help redirect users
  • Sent an email to Tangie and Jim, Tangie is out of the office until the 21st or 22nd

Phil 5.14.12

8:00 – 4:00 FP

  • It’s Bike To Work Week. I’ll need to ride in one day when it’s not raining.
  • Continuing to add SoundWrapper to FingerIO
  • Hmm. The SoundWrappers think that there is always a new sound. Ok, fixed.
  • Decoupled the reads and writes, putting everything on timers.
  • Since I now have 15 unique JSON messages specifying sound per finger, I’m setting up the Sound handling on the arduino side to maintain and assign the data.

Phil 5.11.12

8:00 – 2:30 FP

  • Working on finger sound management
  • Building the Hysterisis class – done
  • Building sound class: volume, id, sound state, ..?
  • Adding SoundWrapper into FingerIO

Tom 5.10.2012

Start: 10:30

  • Found parts needed so that I can have a working finger to experiment with sounds
  • Considered some alternative size exciters and different high power amplifiers but determined they would not be as good as the ones we had
  • Looked into playing midi sequences
  • Found that you can use a program called a midi sequencer to create sequence files
  • I loaded a midi file from Final fantasy 7 into the sequenecer and was able to see a list of the midi commands.  I am not sure how you load this to our boards though.
  • There are lots of libraries in java that make midi easy.  I haven’t found the ones for c++ yet or anything specific to the board for sending sequences

End: 6:30

Mike 5.10.12

Phil 5.10.12

8:00 – 2:00 FP

  • Came in this morning to happily running communication 🙂
  • Sound design
    • Finger moving forward
    • Finger moving backwards
    • initial contact
    • sustained contact
    • release
    • Hysterisis box or something similar to slow down the amount of calls to the sound class
    • I think I need individual messages for each finger
      • {“nm”:f1, “cmd”:start, “srl”:2, “nt”:3, “vol”:0.7, “chnl”:4} // normal command
      • {“nm”:none} // nothing new, keep on doing the same thing for all fingers
  • Restructuring FingerIO to contain the logic for producing the above JSON strings

2:00 – 4:30 ESSO

  • VISIBILITY meeting

5.9.2012 Mike

  • Usual backups at site
  • Meeting is set for tomorrow (Thursday the 10th) to talk about the new data ingest.  Dong, Phil and I will all be going.
  • Finished updating the new index site on the inside and deployed it to the production server with application links to the test server.  I will update the links when we make the move.
  • Back at the mill, resolved all my issues and finished rebuilding each of the projects.  All set to move them inside to the test server once it is no longer the production server.