Running to Stand Still

Ai-Chen and I did a bit of rewiring on the Secret Tree circuit board. One of the problems we had last week was that all of the ground wires for the LEDs on the trees were connected to two PCB terminals. I didn't purchase enough terminal at RadioShack so that every pair could have a ground of its own. This not only made things messy, but it also made the connections suspect.

The other major discovery I made which explained much of the circuit's random (unintended) behavior was that the two AD5206 chips interfered with one another. I plugged a single LED into each of the twelve outputs (across the two chips) and found that a simple test program didn't operate properly when both chips were running. As soon as I disconnected the three data lines (CLK, SDI, and CS) from the second chip, the first chip would work properly. I wondered if there might be some sort of "floating" condition when the two chips were used together. Since CLK and SDI were shared, I hypothesized that CS was likely the culprate. To test this, I added 10K pull-down resistors on the chip selects of both chips. It worked! The test program dimmed the lights in the proper sequence rather than skipping around randomly on the third and fourth outputs.

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I tried again to make another cable prototype yesterday afternoon.

Signal "Wire" Layer

Applying the First Shield Layer

Applying the Second Shield Layer

My sewing was not entirely straight, so I'm not sure how well the prototype will carry audio signals. There may even be shorts between the layers. My next step is to test the "cable" with an audio signal. I want to try the wearable cable with a microphone to see how much noise my homemade cable produces. I also need to terminate the shield and signal wires with rings so I can solder wires or other connectors to them.

I've had another idea about how to make the cables: if I use wider strips of conductive fabric, I could make piping with a stitch of conductive thread down the middle. This would be easier to construct than my second prototype.

I've discovered that three layers of fabric and the associated stitching produce a fairly stiff package. I'm not sure if this will work well for creating curved "wire" paths in clothing.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 01:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Improvisation
I've been thinking about musical improvisation. While it may seem on the outside like a flight of pure fancy, there is actually a systematic approach to it. My idea is that the improvisation system is composed of two main components: vocabulary and inspiration. I believe many people possess the inspiration to improvise, but few have developed the vocabulary.

I feel that vocabulary can be further divided into technique, motif, and progression.

I want to create a personal project which expresses the essence of improvisation, communicates the joy I experience while participating in musical improvisation, and invites observers to become participants in a musical improvisation. The participants will provide the inspiration and the piece will provide the vocabulary.

There are emotional difficulties to improvisation: lack of confidence and fear of embarassment, to name a few.

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We presented the Secret Tree in class on Thursday. Although the MAX patch didn't work, the piece was well-received. We are in the process of finishing the piece for our midterm presentation.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Randomness
Lisa suggested that randomness was perhaps a big idea to explore. We were talking about the idea that making musical expression - or more so - that the express ion of emotion (a seemingly random phenomena) through music requires a great deal of methodical / non-random- ordered, organized effort..

She wondered what sort of music might be produced it the keys on the piano were randomly arranged - tossed there - instead of their linear arrangement in ascending order by pitch from left to right. She wondered if it would be possible to make music on a randomly arranged keyboard.

Would that keyboard be reshuffled each time the performer play or even during the performance?

I cannot conceive of the possibility of developing technique on such an instrument. At the same time, I think this could have the potential to lower the barrier of musical communication between between a professional music and a beginner (or even a non musician) in a collaboration. If the professional musician do esn't have any technique on an instrument he will not be able to clearly express his ideas. If a situation of improvisation is created with musician and non musician under these constraints, perhaps they can have a musical dialogue on a level playingfield -- each able to break through his or her preconceived notions about musicality, expectations, goals...

Hot/Cold -- temperature or color
"I enjoy the rich, resonant bass tones of a Steinway piano - the warmth of those tones combined with the fragile glass-like tones of the treble notes"

Personality Types of Musicians

The Language of Music
MIT researcher Michael Hawley spoke to us in Red's class last semester about his projects and adventures. What stuck with me about his presentation, though, was his passion for live music. His presentation made me think about the idea that in the not so distant past, the piano was the home entertainment system. This sophisticated entertainment system required a nontrivial amount of learning in order to operate. What have we lost in giving up this formerly essential skill of playing the piano to merely playing the radio, CD player, or iPod?

Posted by Michael Chladil at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kelly taught me the basics of machine sewing this afternoon. Thanks for your patience, dear... I wasn't the most model student. We discussed properly squaring up the fabric, threading the machine, and guiding the fabric.

I'm trying to create wearable audio cables which are a component of final project.

The result of my first experiment was not so successful. The machine seemed to choke on the conductive thread, even though I was feeding it from the bobbin (sp?).

Posted by Michael Chladil at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I drove up to Dia.Beacon with Alice, Andy, and Rory to hear Max Neuhaus' Time Peace Beacon. As I entered the building, I felt small -- dwarfed by the scale of the building and the ideas contained within it.

I found it interesting how Neuhaus' piece was able to dialogue with the ambient soundscape of the site without overwhelming it. I felt his sound successfully integrated with the sonic environment, transcended it, and left it different than before I heard it. Just as Peter had described in class, the absence of Neuhaus' piece once it finished left a space behind.

We created a comical incident while listening for Neuhaus' work. I became convinced at one point, while we stood in the semi-silence outside the cafe doors at Dia.Beacon, I was hearing a low-pitched throbbing sound. Its regular rhythmic rumble remained at the edge of my perception. I don't know what I heard, but it wasn't Neuhaus' work; after standing outside for 20 minutes, we finally decided to ask the museum attendants at the bookstore what we were supposed to be listening for. The piece plays at seven minutes to each hour and they claimed we would know when it was happening.

Back outside shortly before 3:53pm, we heard a train pass in the distance and wondered during the ensuing silence if we had been fallen for some big joke.

Then, almost imperceptibly, a tone began to emerge from the ambient sounds. I would describe it as a rich, sweet droning. It reminded me of a note sustained on a pipe organ -- majestic and vibrating. It was harmonically complex, yet seemingly a single tone. The tone grew in intensity and complexity. It was a beautiful sound, but only fleeting. It ended abruptly and yielded its place back to the existing environment.

I can't say how, but I felt the environment was changed somehow in those moments after the sound stopped. The sound's absence left behind a lingering memory and a heightened awareness of what my ears were now hearing. The sounds of the site seemed somehow amplified by the absence of Neuhaus' work.

What would this work be like if we hadn't been expecting it at all. Would we have been caught by surprise?

Posted by Michael Chladil at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1.
A short blast produced by applying envelopes to both the sound amplitude and to the resonant frequency.
Blast.wav
Blast2.wav
MAX/MSP Patch

2. Although this isn't strictly noise (in many regards, far from it)... I had the pleasure of listening for a few minutes to a talented performer in the subway.
Come Back to Me

3. For my distortion patch, I took the clean sample from #2, and played it backwards through Peter's simple distortion patch. CAUTION: this sample is very loud. Turn down your volume before playing.
UnpleasantDistortion1.wav

4.
Here is a sputtering sound I've created using envelopes. I started off trying to make a simple beat patch using envelopes, but it started heading more in the direction of a sputtering noise.
sputter.wav
MAX/MSP Patch

Download samples as a package (excluding the field recording).

Posted by Michael Chladil at 01:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been wrestling with ideas for the Final Project all week. Now it's Monday afternoon and we're going to discuss projects in class tomorrow night. The following are excerpts from my notes during the past week and a preliminary concept.

I started off listing... concrete ideas and potential questions to ask Amit:

I picked an area of interest and started mind-mapping from there... possible project ideas, audiences, and whatever else came to mind at the time:

I had a discussion with my mom earlier in the week about the design of library websites and wondered if I might like to do a project in this area. At the same time, I was also thinking about Maywadenki again and deconstructing something familiar to me: the piano.

From all possible ideas and areas of thought, I constrained myself to those which I was currently interested in: music and sound. This afternoon I began to further develop the idea of working with the piano as inspiration. An idea for a Process began to take shape, but is at this point incomplete. I liked Maywadenki's use of alphabetic characters to define their process (they have and A, B, C, D, E, F, G production process as well as the A-Z Naki nonsense machines). I wondered if I could use an acrostic of the letters PIANO to define my process.

I wrote a statement of intent for the project, but I still don't have a particular "user task" defined.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Work continues on the Secret Tree project. Today we finished cutting out the branches, building a support framework, and unfolded it for the first time. It was almost magical.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

System 2.wav
System 2 MAX/MSP Patch

Posted by Michael Chladil at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Can't solder to conductive thread. It is best to create wire rings and loop the conductive thread around it many times to ensure a good connection
• Hot glue can be used as a strain relief for wires attached to the circuit. I used hot glue to relieve the strain on the piezo sensor solder joints
• Hot glue can be used as strain relief on snaps, too
• To sew very short stitches, push the point of the needle slightly into the fabric, then push your finger against it to make the needle point exit the fabric again
• When sewing on snaps and sewing conductive thread out from the snap (as opposed to terminating a conductive thread trace at a snap), tack one side of the snap down with non-conductive thread. Tie a knot in the end of the conductive thread and sew the conductive thread in the middle of the spot where the snap is being sewn. The messy knot should be on the outside of the garment. This is useful because it allows more control over the frayed ends of the conductive thread. It keeps them underneath the snap on the outer surface of the garment rather than exposed on the inside.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ahn reviewed my prototype v1.1 on Saturday afternoon. The following are notes I took.

- He didn't understand that the "|30" notation indicated the current memory position
- He wanted to see the entire memory displayed as it is entered; had the idea to display each of the thirty characters as a smaller font
- He would like the < and > butons to auto repeat
- He originally thought the LED indicators meant there were three independent character sets
- I was reluctant to make any enhancements to the program... I already had so much invested in the program and tried to defend having to do more work.
- Ahn believes that reviewing the character memory would be a very useful enhancement to the prototype
- What about a pressable jog dial?
- I spent a fair amount of time explaining the operation to Ahn. This leads me to believe that the prototype as proposed is not as intuitive as it could be; one downfall is once you've entered a character, you can't go back and erase it. On the real machine you can.

After we met, I revised my software:
- Prototype now starts up in alpha entry mode which it didn't before. This gives the user a frame of reference to start from.
- Implemented auto repeat for the < and > keys
- Added "Not available" message for buttons that aren't implemented

[ Here is the latest version of the program ]

I also need to explicitly state the task I want users to accomplish, ie. "Please enter 'JACK.SMITH'"

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I found this lovely little item at the Family Dollar for $5. Coupled with a pair of pants for $3.75, I think I have the makings of a pair of percussion pants.

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Making a solid prototype takes time. I thought my prototype from last week was fairly solid, but now the switches won't move at all.

When I began planning my work, I had in mind something that would look like a cutaway from the side of the sewing computer:

I thought I would try to make a skin out of polymer clay in order to accomplish the feel of the real device. If I was analyzing the ergonomics of the device I would definitely concern myself with the form (and perhaps materials).

I started off by transferring the button spacing from my breadboard onto a perfboard. To do this, I took my buttons off the breadboard and punched them through the paper label that was covering them.

Once the buttons were placed with the proper spacing, I soldered them onto the perf board and ran wires. To keep things neat, I soldered a 7-conductor ribbon cable to the top of the board. I debated about whether it was better for the cable to stick out of the top or the bottom, but ultimately decided on the top so the prototype could sit flat on its side.

Three hours later, after drilling, cutting, and wondering if I should have drawn things out first, I had a solid prototype. The way I'm used to working, at least when I work with wood, is to draw detailed plans before beginning. Although I had an idea in my mind (see above sketch) of how the prototype was going to come together, I didn't know how all of the layers were necessarily going to get connected. When I discovered that I didn't have enough standoffs and the right size screws to attach them, I had to keep improvising. It reminded me a lot of playing with Legos when I was younger. I always seemed to run out of the one length of axle I needed and had to piece things together another way. In short, I wonder if it takes more time to hack something like this together, or to draw out detailed plans and then construct it.

It is definitely my tendency to want to lay things out in Visio or sink some serious time into Sketchup (even though I don't know it very well). Since I was working at home and didn't have the precision of the drill press, I felt that I might as well just improvise and keep working rather than wasting the day drawing plans I wouldn't need to use again. Yes, I would have had nice illustrations for my blog, but it wasn't worth the two or three additional hours. It's all about the constraints, right? Today's constraint was time.

After assembling the unit, I covered the button with cardboard to prevent electrical shorts. I didn't have long enough screws to go through the bottom of the IPAC2 and a sheet of acylic.

Lest I should give the impression that this week's assignment came and went without the requisite burst of madness, I did try to create buttons for my prototype.

That's right, I sculpted buttons... and they would have worked, but I ran out of steam when I realized I was going to need to drill another six holes in another sheet of acrylic. I may attempt this feat again before Tuesday. This is contingent upon first tweaking my code to recognize the new button assignments. The physical construction of the prototype encouraged a different wiring scheme from the one I used on the breadboard.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm working with Ji-Sun Lee and Ai-Chen Lin on a "secret tree" for Living Art. Our assignment is to "Make a Random."

You can approach the tree and tell it a secret; in fact, it may be that the tree needs to be told secrets in order to stay alive.

Ji-Sun has already constructed a prototype tree.

Ai-Chen and I have been working on MAX/MSP and Arduino code prototypes to record the secrets and transform them into lights on the tree.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've updated my operational prototype with the LEDs as Amit suggested in class. After trying them out, it seems I need to determine how they should behave after I've pressed the "A" button and I've used the ">" or "<" to go out of the range of the characters indicated by the new LEDs.

Options:

• LEDs only stay on after "A" is pressed until the ">" or "<" buttons are pressed
• LEDs always reflect the current position in the character set

What do you think?

I'm also wondering for the final prototype if I need to expose the "mem" and mem "<" buttons. They are not completely necessary for the operation I want to work with: setting the name. The "<" button allows review of the current items in memory. Is the idea here to simulate everything or just enough to show the concept we're trying to improve?

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Last week, Peter assigned us readings from John Cage and Luigi Rossolo.

Cage's thoughts on the need for new instruments in "the future of music: credo" parallel Rossolo's in "The Art of Noise." Both men anticipated the development of flexible synthesis techniques by which sounds of any character might be constructed. I'm not sure when Russolo wrote "The Art of Noise," but I imagine it was in the late 1800s. While he didn't have the technological vocabulary to describe some of the concepts Cage was promoting, he described synthesis in his own way.

I'm personally in favor of a hybrid of these techiques, where recorded sound combines with generated sound.

Cage's writing style intrigued me. I found I could read his section headings by themselves as a coherent statement or read them as introductions to the body paragraphs. I don't believe I've seen written composition like that before.

I didn't agree with Russolo's dismissal of all musical sound as banal. While his interests lay in moving farther and farther away from traditional music and into the complete freedom of pure sound, I continue to be moved by the live performance of music by a human person.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sample 1: Additive Synthesis
I started playing around with this right after class last week and had it in mind to make some sort of nasty sounding bass patch. I used envelopes to control the frequency and DC offset of the oscillators. I can't seem to predict, though, how the envelopes actually get used. The way I think it should work is that the metronome kicks off the envelopes and the frequencies I drew should be smoothly sent to the cycle~ object. That's what happens, except that the full envelope I drew doesn't get used.

01 - Rumble.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 2: Ring Modulation

Ring Modulation.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 3: FM Fwub Bass
I modified Peter's FM patch to ramp the modulator amplitude between 20 and 250 over 1 second. This, in combination with the other modulation parameters, yielded a flappy bass sound.

Sample 4: FM Grow Tone
Using the FM synthesis patch again, but this time with different parameters, I created bass tone using a sine wave that evolved with a sound like a resonant filter sweep.

03-FM_Fwub_Bass.wav 04-FM Grow Tone.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 5: Faux Scratch
I discovered an interesting sound by scraping the first modulator frequency between -20 and 20. It made the sound burble a bit and sound almost like a turntablist scratching.

05 Faux Scratch.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 6: Blippy
Blippy, Atari-like noise sample. This one makes use of the modulo function to create the nasty repeating, yet random, blips.

06 Blippy.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 7: Metallic Additive "Feedback"
I took a look in the MAX/MSP documentation folder and looked through the tutorial pages. There are tutorial topics on all of the synthesis techniques we looked at in class along with some helpful patches. I took the additive synthesis patch and started hacking away at it to see what I could produce. The tutorial contains a subpatch called "partial~" which encapsulates some of the basic elements of an oscillator so the patcher doesn't get so messy. The first patch I created with my modifications uses a fundamental frequency and makes two sets of tone clusters, one of which is subltey randomized. I find that this sounds a bit like feedback in a PA system, but with some interesting pulses caused by the beating of adjacent frequencies.

Sample 8: Metallic Additive Shimmer
One of the presets from the original MAX/MSP tutorial patch sounded interesting when I played it back through my modified version of the patch. I think it sounds a bitter like a metallic shimmer.

07 Metallic Additive Feedback.wav 08 Metallic Additive Shimmer.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Download all samples from this entry.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a low-tech piece which considers the differences between humans and computers.

Consider for a moment that all computers know how to do at a fundamental level is deal with bits of information: ones and zeroes strung together in finite lists.

Consider for a moment that any "creativity" a computer possesses has been given it by a human programmer.

Let's further constrain our thinking to the process of drawing. Computers "draw" using pixels, or discrete bits of information. We create using continuous lines. We put pen or pencil to paper and the inspiration flows out of our minds and onto the page. Even constrained, we have infinitely more imagination than a computer.

Let's confine ourselves to rectangles and a simple set of rules

Equipment

• Felt-tipped pen
• 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper

• Please read all rules before beginning
• Use the provided felt-tipped pen to draw a rectangle on the paper
• If the paper is blank, you may draw a rectangle of any size anywhere you wish on one side of the paper
• If the paper is not blank, please follow the following guidelines
  • Your rectangle must be drawn on the same side of the paper as existing rectangles
  • Your rectangle must be drawn outside of any existing rectangle
  • Your rectangle must not intersect any existing rectangle
• After you have drawn a rectangle, ask someone else to draw the next rectangle
• The drawing is finished when it is no longer possible to satisfy the above conditions

Posted by Michael Chladil at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I found that Steve Mann's article responded to some of the issues raised in Frank Webster's Theories of the Information Society with regard to surveillance as an important information gathering tool of the "scientific management" mindset of our corporate and governmental systems. Mirroring Webster's desire to understand the impact of information technology (primarily in the form of information gathering) on the regulation of current society, Mann wants to question the claim that surveillance will lead to a "better future" (Mann 94).

What I found fascinating about the article was that Mann's experiments in "Reflectionism," relied upon his "clothing" and the identity he created with it. It seems that the experiments he undertook would not have been so directly provocative if he simply visited establishments wearing "normal" clothes and carrying a video camera. By using the personally expressive power of his clothing, he literally wore his attitude "on his sleeve." This was especially subversive in the context of our discussion of wearables because unlike a handheld technical accessory, his imaging and data transmission system was deeply embedded in the garments he was wearing. He mirrors the use of built-in video surveillance as a new "prosthetic territory" of architecture (Mann 95) by his total integration of the equiment into his identity, even going so far as to insist on his "self+prosethetic device" (Mann 101) identity on official documentation.

"'Reflectionism' and 'Diffusionism': New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway"
Steve Mann
Leonardo, Vol. 31 No. 2. (1998), pp.93-102

Posted by Michael Chladil at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Building the operational prototype was time consuming. It took more than twice as long as the paper prototype.

In the paper session, the burden of patience and imagination was on the user. I feel like paper prototypes will be good for illustrating concepts and refining them. The audience for the paper prototype should be a colleague who is either familiar with the process or has some background information about the operation you are trying to evaluate. Otherwise, I think too many things must be explained. For example, I had a discussion with a co-worker this morning about a design I was working on. Having a rough sketch from my tablet in the correct scale gave him a better idea of the idea I was trying to communicate so he could make constructive comments about it.

I think the operational prototype may be most helpful when I'm looking for actual user feedback on a particular operation. The test subjects can and should be far removed from the design process. The user can perform the test with a minimum amount of explanation.

Advantages of the Paper Prototype
- Rapid design, redesign, and refinement
- Low committment of time and attachment to design
- Lightweight, portable

Disadvantages of the Paper Prototype
- Inaccurate sense of the time required to perform an operation
- May not be useful in assessing the ergonomics of the operation
- Requires user to have knowledge of the problem domain; ie. what are we trying to assess? what needed to be left out? what exact operation must be performed?
- Requires a patient user

Advantages of the Operational Prototype
- Accurate indication of time required to complete operation
- Allows user to enter much more fully into the interaction (they can forget that you are there watching and simply concentrate on performing the task)
- May be very good for selling the concept beyond immediate colleagues

Disadvantages of the Operational Prototype
- Can be time consuming to produce (compared with paper prototype) and may develop a deeper personal attachment to the concept or idea. Perhaps delegating the task to another can help avoid this
- Requires greater attention to details of the interaction (again more time)

I think the operational prototype allowed me to really confirm that the operation took less time. It was clear to see (just based on the time of the videos alone) that it was a much shorter process.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To improve the interaction quality when entering characters into the stitch memory of the Bernina 145, I propose additional functionality for the existing "A" button. The sewing machine currently jumps to the "A" character when the "A" button is pressed. Nothing happens currently if the "A" button is pressed repeatedly.

I propose that pressing the "A" button will cycle among three commonly used "jump points" in the list of characters: "A", "0", and "_". I believe this will accelerate text entry because it will allow the current character "cursor" to jump quickly in a list of 59 characters. (As an aside... I have to wonder why there are only 59 characters in the list. Why not one of the 2^n numbers?)

Tomorrow evening I will film my user interaction test using the software prototype I developed this evening. It would be very easy to get carried away with making a realistic mockup of the Bernina, but I did my best to stick to the bare
essentials.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I asked my wife to operate the paper prototype. When I shot the video, I had her enter the whole string. This was torturous for her -- and I had her do it twice: first without the improved process and then with it.

I learned several important lessons from constructing the prototype and from her subsequent testing with it:
- It is important to cleary communicate the desired operation. In our first testing session, we forgot to use the Alpha button to jump back to the beginning of the alphabet.

- It is worthwhile to think through (or even mockup) the interaction before building the prototype. I had devised what I believed to be a clever system for scrolling through the numbers on my prototype which involved pulling a long tape of the characters through a window on the paper control panel. It was a clever idea, but it didn't take into account the spatial orientation of the paper control panel. I had a mental model of horizontal scrolling in my head when vertical scrolling would have been much better for this application. When I discovered this flaw, I had already produced a full version of the prototype and was reluctant to fix it. As as result, it was difficult to pull the numbers horizontally past my wife's hand without bunching them up.

Analysis
The time spent operating the prototype and then subsequently editing and uploading the videos was substantial. Although I have videos of both interactions, I have only posted the first test. Notating this interaction is quite unwieldy. After consulting with Amit, a more useful test would have been to concentrate my efforts on analyzing the part of the interaction that was particularly frustrating: having to scroll through the entire character set to get to the "." character. Amit suggested that I could have focused simply on entering "N.S" and notating that.

I edited the process of entering "[AT]SERVER.COM" out of the video I've posted above and as a further extension could even edit out everything except the "N.S" of from "JOHN.SMITH". Qualitatively, I do feel that the improvement I've suggested will make a big difference -- especially for long strings. My wife mentioned that she doesn't usually use the machine's memory for long strings because they take so long to enter -- and it can be difficult to remember the characters she has already entered.

Posted by Michael Chladil at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I'm going to learn to sew... so I thought it would be most important to be able to write letters with the sewing machine. Since I'll soon be creating garments for myself, it would be very useful to sew my email address in them, in the event I lose them.

Description
My wife's Bernina 145 Sewing Computer is very well designed and extremely usable. I had never tried to operate it before and found that I could navigate its controls without opening the instruction manual. I even figured out that the Bernina 145 can stitch simple alphanumeric characters into fabric. My wife has found that the interface for entering characters into the stitching memory is pretty weak. As I'll demonstrate in the videos of the operation, it takes many button presses to navigate through the character set. I believe the character-entry process could be improved without even adding any buttons to the control panel.

The initial operation I began testing was entering "JACK.SMITH[AT]SERVER.COM" into the machine's memory.

The following video documents my attempt to complete this operation.

Analysis
It turns out that notating and evaluating this particular operation is a greater level of committment than I had anticipated. There are many, many button presses. There are also a number of ways to complete the entry

Posted by Michael Chladil at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)