Sunday: An interesting turn of events...

Today we met up to try to get the final work done on the bag. We started out by repacking it a couple of more times and tried stuffing down very hard catalogues to brace the buttons on the backside. After some failed attempts we were losing hope, and on top of that the SunSpot in the bag ran out of power! The recharge time using the USB-cable was several hours and we really had to keep on trying different solutions. 

We decided to make a temporary switch of one button to the Phidget instead of the SunSpot just to be able to test out different packing solutions. To our big suprise the button now (without any modification) worked perfectly!

Since we had built up all this negative feelings for the SunSpot (which actually was not at all the problem we found out later ;)) we quickly decided to cut the cables to the Spot and connect them all directly to the phidget, and a quick test showed us that almost all of the buttons worked great. Some buttons were so severaged from the removal of foam and repacking that they kept beeing pressed so some more repacking was in order.

The software modifications were trivial, and we could go home with a feeling that we would get it done in time. We left some work for Monday, but that was mostly matters of tweaking.

This shows one of the first test we did with the new buttons. We actually spent quite a bit of time selecting the sounds for a correct hit versus an incorrect hit as this really affected the feeling of the interaction with the bag. We also got the delay between the hit and the sound to be very low, which is very important for the user experience.

Mia is cutting the poor SunSpot free from the bad smelled boxing bag...


The Phidget to the rescue!


Testing out the BeatBox Beta 1...