P1015305 from rafael vargas on Vimeo.

P1015315 from rafael vargas on Vimeo.

Glove osc Update from rafael vargas on Vimeo.

The drum gloves comes from the idea of converting movements and sounds from physical and electronic instruments into a portable ‘surface free’ sound producer. Instead of hitting a specific surface with your fingers that outcomes in some type of sound, the  drum gloves will provide you with surfaces will be on your fingers. The concept is that when you wear the gloves, you can hit any surface and produce midi signals that can be sent to your mobile phone, tablet or computer and use any virtual instrument. Assign some instruments and start playing.

Changes made for the final

Smaller components were needed. Also to get rid of the cable that goes to the computer. Arduino Fio solves those problems. It’s small and you can connect a 3v lithium battery to it. The wi-fly adds the capability of communication via Osc Protocols with any device that can handle it: Computers, tablets, mobiles. . .

Now, this time the prototype needed a smaller circuit board because the glove is smaller. A custom circuit board was milled @ the fablab for that.

The code got a lot more complicated than with the waveshield. Osc packets had to be send via wifi using the ip addres of the device that was going to be targeted. To test messages were sent to max msp. These messages  had to be activated  by the pressure in the finger sensors.

These are pictures of a test prototype to test the sensors. No ergonomics nor specific design were considered in this stage of the process. That will be attended later on.

In the middle of the project and making some circuits I found this crazy machine, called wave shield. It allows me to insert my own sounds into a SD card and play them using my beat glove system through a headphone jack. It can be connected to speakers or interfaces. It has some limitations though. It only support 2gb of memory and the .wav files have to be maximum (22KHz, 16-bit, mono PCM). NO MP3 FILES ALLOWED. Also it comes completely disassembled and soldering may take a few hours for a begginer. Here is some of the process:

At first *before using the wave shield*, Arduino sketches where pretty simple. Some pressure sensors were analog inputted and translated into simple sounds. Notes were assigned to each ‘finger’ so each could have a different sound. This is the basics of the plan.

original sketch idea:

FUTURE PLANS:

Work on the ergonomics and design of the glove.

Smaller Arduino that can fit in the system.

Ion Battery Powered

WIFI communication with computer and Ipad *MIDI*

Good videos of it working