At this stage, I’m in a weird combination of triumphant and defeated. I got the audio to play from the prop shield. And even more than that, I linked it to the tilt sensors so that whenever I touch or grab the book, a wonderful bird song plays.
And then tragedy struck- before I thought to get any documentation video, the world decided it would no longer cooperate with Tori Mondello. The arduino stopped recognizing my teensy board. I would only get an error message saying “No teensy boards on any ports of this computer”. I tried everything- restarting arduino, restarting my computer, going to a different sketch, pressing the program button on the teensy itself. Nothing worked.
When I went back to the board today, I found that the code I had written had also been deleted. At that point, I made the decision not to rewrite the code that I had lost. And the reason for that leads me to my next point:
I’m no longer using the Prop Shield to play audio tracks. In the end, Aaron and I discussed that the best option would be Serial Communication with openFrameworks. This is a lot better suited for my project because the Prop Shield has limited space. I don’t think it would hold the all of the audio files that I would need to complete my project. If I use Serial communication, then I have more options in terms of how the users interact with my project. Therefore, the new idea is ten elements that are in conversation with each other, synced up so the reader is forced to follow the storyline. There will be some overlapping sounds, specifically with the soundtracks looping underneath the other elements.
It is very obvious that at this point, I am very behind my timeline. I spent the last week just making the Prop Shield work and now that I’m not using that anymore, I’m at almost stage zero. So, the weekend will be filled with intense, hard work. I’m confident that I’ll get back on track for my timeline.
In the meantime, here are some pictures of my wiring and the placement of the sensor.
Luckily, this experimentation went well. I learned that having the book at an angle was a very nice aesthetic that I wanted to play with. Then, however, I had to make sure the tilt switch was not constantly triggering. I decided that, instead of having the tilt on the book like I had originally planned, I would attach it to the string instead. This way it will be upright and not triggered at the beginning, but will also remain receptive to if someone interacts with the book.
