Parts have arrived!

Joysticks, switches and a tonne of arcade buttons, its time to get building!

Scott's Sweet Launcher

My friend Scott has just started work on his project in the lab with me, a pneumatically driven targeting sweet launcher! Check out his blog here: The Sweet Launcher

He's been a great help with stuff on my project and he's an absolute boss at electronics so I'm sure he's going to be doing some really impressive stuff.

We're both working as part of the Blake Bursary Project - where we work on the project of our choice as a demo for open days and workshops to give an insight into Electrical and Electronic engineering and the cool things we can make with it.

Veroboard

Taken the nunchuck casing off and re-soldered it's board to the new veroboard. Everything is ready to be mounted in a case, just waiting for the 3way switch to arrive.

Starting work now on an arcade button keyboard instrument in the style of a 'pianocade'
(See http://www.pianocade.com/)

Joystick

Almost done with instrument one here's a video, it 's really starting to feel like a playable instrument now!

I now have the joystick on the nunchuck working in real time like the accelerometer, it has a really nice feel to it. Here's the controls and what they do:

• Touch/Pressure strip (to be combined) triggers the note and changes pitch as you move along it
• Joystick decides the octave (up octave normal or down octave)
• Accelerometer changes the rate of duty cycle variation

All I'm waiting for now is a 3 way switch to arrive so you can select the duty cycle, then I'm going to put this instrument together in a (potentially laser cut) plastic box, like in the badly drawn sketch I did before:

Prototyping

I'm pretty much done with prototyping / coding for the first instrument. I've managed to get pitch bend working on a softpot (potentiometer touch strip) and triggering the notes with a pressure sensor:

Also the nunchuck works now in real time to modify the sound as you play the notes - in this case the speed of duty cycle variation.

This now will be put together in a case so the pressure and touch strip are combined as one strip and the nunchuck will be built into the case so you tilt the instrument to vary the sound. I'll also be adding control parameters to the joystick of the nunchuck.

Here's a badly drawn sketch to show you what the instrument will look like:

The idea is to hold the instrument in your hands, playing the touch strip with the thumb of one hand and messing with the joystick/switch/dial with the other hand, as well as tilting the instrument.

The joystick will change the octave of the touch strip, and add pitch bend. The dial controls the length of the note and the 3way switch determines whether the duty cycle is 12.5%, 25% or 50%.

Nunchuck

Just a short update video, I've managed to translate the data from the Wii nunchuck's accelerometer, joystick and buttons into midi data on an arduino micro that is sent via the link cable to the gameboy.

In the demo I'm using the 'Z' button to play a note, and the y axis of the accelerometer to change the speed of the pitch bend.

Next up, working on the pressure sensitive touch strip (softpot) to play varying notes!