MiMu BLOG

Tim Exile’s Reaktor Looper meets The ArduIMU Gloves, a love story

Today Ash Dorey from Team Exile visited Kelly at Pemberton Cottage, where we took Tim Exile’s looper and our new ArduIMU gloves on their first date.  It is safe to say it was love at first OSCight™.  By the time he left, we had the looper+gloves running on both our computers with the glove data easily mappable to the looper’s effects and other controls. (by “easily,” I mean if you are someone who can penetrate many layers of rather insane reaktor code…GUI to come later).

Some suggestions from Imogen after watching the first glove-controlled looper trial

As usual with any time someone else puts on the gloves, hundreds of new ideas on how they could be used to control stuff were born.  Ash is going to go away and play around with the Glove Simulator and his Reaktor patch to experiment with sets of mappings we can start playing with in Berlin.

Immi came over for a bit to check out the progress.  She thought it would be cool to have the LED feedback on the gloves mirrored by LEDs on the looper hardware so that the player could easily check to see that everything is working by glancing at the hardware from across the stage.  This could involve some cleverly (although possibly too expensively) designed skins for the hardware (as opposed to requiring any kind of hardware/PCB redesign).

Some notes on running the gloves with Reaktor

This was the first real testrun of the new Glover Bridges, with the incorporation of the reaktor bridge into Tim’s Reaktor patch.  Adam’s original bridge was updated to reflect the most recent changes in the Glove OSC output message list.  I have pushed these changes, as well as the version of Tim’s patch that includes the reaktor bridge, to bitbucket.

Reaktor talks to Osculator to get help with the conversion of OSC to MIDI  It’s important when running the the gloves with Reaktor to turn off all direct MIDI inputs to Reaktor in the audio/midi settings and just let all the MIDI for the patch come into Reaktor from Osculator.  To do this, you’ll need the special looper Osculator patch, as well as the right port settings for Reaktor and Osculator to talk/listen to each other and the gloves.  We are currently sending OSC from The Gloves on Port 8080, receiving on 8000, and Osculator is on port 8005.

Glover was modified to accommodate Reaktor’s quirky floating-point-only message format.  Whereas all of the gyro peak data were previously being sent out with no arguments, they are now sent with a floating point argument of value 0.  I will be going through tomorrow and double checking that this isn’t going to impact the other bridges.

Some notes on running the ArduIMU gloves

Still quite a bit of difficulty first connecting to the gloves.  I’ve never had it work on the first try, and the most I’ve had to try is 9 times.

After connected, the left glove connection is very robust (and all the fingers match up to the glover UI in the bend sensor panel).  The right glove, which tends to keep breaking at the hard/soft and solder connection points, is much more problematic.  It loses its connection with the laptop, so in the end, we were testing with just the left glove to avoid the intermittent connectivity problem.  it also seems to be wired differently than the left glove, so none of the fingers match up to the RH Glover UI.  I suspect once we get the gloves to Berlin, Hannah and Seb will be able to eliminate these problems by giving the glove a couple more sensors and some more elegant resoldering.