Monday, March 24, 2008

Distinct Tincts

When I decided to go ahead and have my own PCBs made for what would become the Tinct I posted a request for people who would be willing to split the cost of fabrication with me. Two people - Brad Hill and Devon Jones - were brave (or foolish) enough to respond, despite having no reason to have any confidence that the design would work; without them, I probably wouldn't have proceeded because of cost. It's great having people with whom I can bounce ideas around, to whom I can complain when things aren't working, and to whom I can brag when things finally work.

I'm very pleased to report that, a mere week after I completed the first OcTinct, Devon has completed his. We decided to go with computer science-style numbering, so we're calling mine Tinct 0, and his is Tinct 1. Brad isn't slacking off, either, and has been working on a number of monome/Arduino crossover projects, which you can see pictures of on his Flickr page.

A few other quick Tinct updates: I'm pretty happy with the current version of the firmware, and have cleaned up and commented the code to make it usable by others. I'm willing to call this a "release candidate," whatever that means in this context. There are a few minor optimizations I want to try, but I have one that works without any known bugs. I rewrote the TinctSerial program; the serial performance of Processing sucked, so I rewrote it in Python (my first Python program ever). That solved all of my problems, although the current version is a processor hog. Devon taught me everything I know about Python (over IM, no less), so he's going to fix up the code. Finally, the controller board design is forthcoming. I just need to test my power supply circuitry to make sure it works, and then it's time to have the boards made. After that, all that's left to do is build a case!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hey mate,

it would be totally awesome if you could post the codes !!

it's a beautiful project and the result is really a success !

congrats