I’ve been playing around in Blender and QCad to figure out how I want to mount the sensors onto my bass, and I’ve come up with a design for a cloth covering that will house the sensors in pockets on the bass. Much thanks to Chromo for reminding me of those bass bibs that some players use. This will allow me to remove the sensor apparatus if I want to play acoustically, and also to non-permanently mount the sensors onto a different bass if I’m traveling. I put together a sewing pattern, so as soon as I get to a fabric store and select a cloth, I should be able to sew this up without too much trouble.

I built 5 more sensor circuits and boxed them all up in these snazzy black boxes you can see in the picture. They even match my ThinkPad! I’ve been working on PD patches to explore different ways to map the sensor streams onto parameters. On Douglas Repetto’s suggestion I started looking at higher-order systems, and realized that if I look at the change in adjacent sensor samples, throw out high positive and negative values, and then run them into an accumulator, the output tracks slow-moving input, but ignores anything fast. This allows you to pump the value up or down by repeatedly moving slowly in one direction, than quickly in the other. You can also make a value stick if you pull your hand away quickly enough. Be on the lookout for some video examples. I also made a patch to detect when you’ve tapped the sensor, to be used for things like setting a tempo or delay time.

Nearing some sort of finality in this design, I’ve put the circuit in a box. I also put my arduino board in a box, which involved de-soldering the power connector and the header sockets, as well as cutting off the corners with a bandsaw, so I would probably advise using a bigger box if you’re planning on doing the same. Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll give the main MouseTrap info page an update with the new developments, as well as part numbers for the boxes and all the connectors I used. I decided to go with a standard DC power jack, banana jacks for the DC output and ground, and a binding post to attach the electrode. Definitely an improvement. The boxes also have a solid feel to them without being heavy.