I taught my classes how to make custom pcb in KiCAD this fall. One of my students, Dom Frugoli, ended the semester with PCB holiday cards (complete with silkscreen family portrait and Krampus).
Happy Holidays!
Photo: auto-wah circuit by Izaak Thompson
When I first started assigning circuit board projects, I couldn't find much material online about how to grade a circuit board, so I devised my own rubric.
I found the quality of student work improved significantly once they had the Build Checklist and could see how it was weighted in the grade.
The photo: my student Izaak Thompson devised and completed this circuit for his auto wah pedal project in my advanced Building Circuits class in 2020. Since the class was entirely online due to the pandemic, students had to submit photos and video of their assignments. It was an advanced class so all of them had previously taken the pre-requisite electronics class in-person before the pandemic started; I think that experience prepared them to do this course at home.
On a side note, the pandemic is how I discovered that one can troubleshoot circuits surprisingly well just by looking at photos-- the hardest part is making sure the photos are well lit!
Waubonsee Community College recently invited me to install my work in a lovely art project space located in the Dickson Center.
Red Rubber Bands was on display from September 8 - October 20.
Photo Credits: Tonya Whitlock
I recently visited Waubonsee Community College to give a talk to Debra Kayes Halpern's
Design students, sharing some of my knitted circuitry and discussing my sculpture installed at the college. Waubonsee had
invited me to do a hands-on workshop with the students but the course
was in an art room without any electronics tools so I couldn't introduce
them to the joy of soldering or breadboarding. Instead, we made Throwies, a brilliantly simple form of electronic graffiti invented by the Graffiti Research Lab at Eyebeam.
Throwies require zero tools and minimal materials. Tape the LED to the
battery, then tape on a rare earth magnet. Find a public space with
metal infrastructure (a bridge? building pipes?) and toss your Throwie
till it sticks. We tossed our around in a black box theater on campus.
***Fun fact: the LED doesn't need the standard protection resistor in this circuit because the coin cell battery's internal resistance prevents it from delivering enough current to damage the LED.
For Columbia students, there's still a few seats available for this fall's class. We are waiving the AUDI 313 pre-requisite. If you've taken AUDI 104 or have electronics experience, that's enough. (Just email me if you want to register.)
These videos are from the Fall 2020 section
You can find a bunch more students projects, from different semesters, on my youtube channel.
Foundations in Sound Design for Embedded Media, edited by Michael Filimowicz.
I contributed Chapter 2: The Electronics of Microphones and Loudspeakers. This allowed me to revisit in-depth the technical material I was exploring when I did my textile loudspeakers. The book features the work of 25 authors, with far more impressive biographies than my own. I'm enjoying reading their contributions on the subject.
Fabric and Fiber Inventions by STEAM educator Kathy Ceceri. I'm thrilled to be featured as a "Fabric Inventor" on pg 116-117.
This year I've been busy managing the explosive growth of Columbia's Electronics-For-Audio curriculum. What started as a single elective course is now a 3-course sequence!
The Audio Department's little electronics workshop previously served about two dozen students a semester. This spring, we had almost a hundred! We hired several new adjunct faculty, and an incredible team of teaching assistants who helped me keep 8 sections running smoothly. It's clear that we're outgrowing our current digs, so I'm also working out plans for some serious upgrades for the coming year. Change is afoot!
Here's the new lineup:
AUDI 104: Audio Electronics (pictured) The first, intro-level course, Audio Electronics, is now a part of the required "core" course sequence for majors. Students build stuff from scratch, like this loudspeaker from a plastic cup. They also build circuits using Snap Circuit kits, which are great for small group activities. (This is what's happening in the photographs.)
AUDI 313: Building Circuits for Modular Synthesis with Logic Gates After completing Audio Electronics, students can follow up with this elective on building circuits for analog synthesis. We build a number of projects from Nic Collins' book, Handmade Electronic Music. (I'm still kinda working on the course name for this one. I think I overdid it when the college said "More descriptive course names, please". )
AUDI 413: Building Circuits with Pick-Ups and Pedals This advanced class focuses on op-amps and pickups. It also fulfills a senior course requirement. Since students take the introductory class as a pre-requisite, they'll be able to get a lot further, a lot faster, in these two follow-up classes.
The videos feature my Spring 2018 advanced students, in an improvised performance at Columbia's Manifest Urban Arts Festival this past May. I'm so proud! They built most of the hardware themselves: springboard instruments (inspired by Eric Leonardson), contact mics, spring reverb units, fuzz pedals and pitch trackers. Plus, checkout Rachael's "squarinet"-- that's a square clarinet-- that she built for her Physics of Musical Instruments course with Professor Dave Dolak.
Student Performers: Rachael Cowell, Vito Di Beasi, Hunter Funk, Aaron Gelblat-Bronson, Mac Kelley, Derek Muhl, Nick Novak, Isaiah Quino, Sky Roessler, Daniel Vega
Hands-on workshops require a lot of planning. People progress at
different rates and can get impatient waiting for each other or for
assistance. Too much waiting and the workshop loses momentum.
So
I like to work with small groups. I move around to offer assistance,
and encourage people to help themselves to materials and progress at
their own rate.
This wasn't going to work at SIGGRAPH-- the
classroom was spread out with no middle aisle. And I'd be wearing a body
mic. If I walked in front of the speakers, I'd set off ear-piercing
feedback (which I did, twice, oops...). Plus... I wanted to give people
sleeves that fit their hands but there was no way to measure hand sizes
of participants ahead of time.
So we had to get creative with solutions.
Dylan responds to a post-it note call for help.
There wasn't room for participants to get their own materials, and asking for help would slow the presentation down. So I gave everyone bright yellow post-it notes. If they needed something, they wrote it on the post-it, attached it to top of their computer monitor, and one of our volunteers would sprint over to read the note and help or retrieve materials. Worked great!
Materials were distributed to each workstation in baggies, in advance, thanks to workshop coordinator Brittany Ransom. Plus, we put a pdf of the powerpoint presentation on each computer's desktop (see below). I invited people to use it to progress at their own rate.
I tested out the activity with the volunteers ahead of time, and realized that tech people were going to struggle with sewing the wires in place. They needed sewing diagrams! Luckily I had time to add a few. We didn't have to worry too much about the knot because we had Fraycheck-- a fabric glue. And glue makes sewing seem easy!
I also made diagrams on Fritzing for the breadboard connections--super helpful.
Instead of sizing participants, everyone randomly received either a 10x30 or 12x40 size-sleeve on it (with the size labelled). I figured this would get the right size into the hands of at least half the attendees. I invited people to swap with their neighbors or flag us down to request another size. (I also brought 10x40 and 12x50 sized sleeves.) I was surprised to find that only a few people requested another size.
In preparation, I had taped the resistor packs onto a large cardboard backing with the values labelled. During the workshop, it was easy for the volunteers to grab the exact resistor they needed to "fill the order" on each post-it.
Materials for Knitted Finger Sleeves
Resistive yarn (80% polyester, 20% stainless steel)
Snaps #199 10 Line (6.9 mm), nickel finish
Striveday silicone coated stranded wire AWG 26
Male crimp pins these are great for breadboarding
tapestry needle
yarn for sewing wire
Dritz Fraycheck
Also used:
Breadboards
Hookup wire
Arduino uno
piezo discs
resistors
multimeters
scissors
My tools (used to knit the sleeves ahead of time and attach wire with snaps)
Superba Knitting Machine
Snap Press Machine (with punch/die)
Crimp tool (I use Engineer Inc PA-09 crimping pliers )
Adding a fixed resistor ½ the value of a variable resistance sensor improves Arduino performance.
Whenever you connect a 2-lead variable resistor (VR) sensor (like a photo cell or bend sensor) to an Arduino, you add a resistor to it. I did this with my knitted stretch sensor. It creates a circuit known as a voltage divider, which controls the voltage level, based on the relative resistance of the resistor to the sensor. This is important because the voltage level is what AnalogRead "reads" in Arduino.
I wondered what value would give the best performance for my knitted sensors. So I used the equation below to calculate the output range of voltage dividers, based on the ratio between R1 and R2, given that R2 is my knitted sensor and R1 is the (unchanging) resistor. I graphed the outputs for each VR value at 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of its maximum range.
My advanced class made spring reverb units this semester. Steve and Connor stacked theirs together with a homemade tone control and a hefty dose of feedback.
Trevor, Andy, and Brian, plus some really sweet synth.
Daniel, Rachel, Robert, and the joy of three sequencers on one clock.