I just don't believe how this project has gone. Well I sort of do. I knew it was going to be difficult while living out of a suitcase, but just how difficult it's become is unbelievable.

The second week I knuckled down on the project now that I knew what I was doing. I did a bit more research on Monday and had decided to head into AUT that week. Living more than 50km away, that could be a bit expensive with petrol and then there is parking and just the time it takes to get there and back. I know people who live in the city so I can crash somewhere, although parking costs are completely unbelievable. It can cost $22 a day in the city. On Tuesday I tried to see what I could do at home still, procrastinating the costs of getting and staying in the city. I then discovered that I could actually get a lift into the city, the only caveat being I'd be leaving home at 6am.

So why am I telling you all of this? Because all of this life admin has been has been an overriding theme this holiday and I'm really annoyed.

On Wednesday I came into AUT, I was able to get a lift later in the day through alternative means, first heading to a garage where most of my belongings are to get a few things I'd need later in the week. At AUT in the afternoon, I mucked around with MaxMSP working out how to load sounds into memory for later playback. This took quite a while. I knew how to load sounds straight from disk as needed, but with 8 sounds, I didn't want any lag. So I had to work out with the help of the documentation how this was done. Things don't always work the way you expect them. I also needed some decent drum sounds and first trawled this mac's harddisk as it has some music and audio software installed, but that was mildly fruitless, I didn't really like what I found. I went home and searched the internet. It's a little bit annoying, I'm pretty sure I have a decent drum kit or 2 on my desktop computer. The one that is packed away.

Thursday and Friday were both the 5:30am starts, getting into AUT at 7. I was able to put a lot of time into the code, but really, I'm a bit annoyed at how long it took just to get a program that played a sound when you hit a certain key. It's really simple, but I just had a raft of newbie issues. Friday afternoon I bought a soldering iron, a stand and some solder. I'd quite have liked to get some extra flux as I'd be soldering to a sanded circuit board and the copper would probably oxidise straight away making it hard to solder to, but couldn't find that. I also bought 50m of black wire for $6. Multiple colours would have been handy, but I could get by just tagging the wires as I went. But I felt mostly prepared to build the jeans. Sort of. I'd be improvising with some house hold materials to make sensors, but I thought it would probably work.

Saturday was the big day of making the jeans with sensors, I found and old pair of jeans and started making the sensors. They were made from polystyrene foam sandwiched between 2 layers of tinfoil. Wires were taped to the foil and it was all taped together with masking tape. Low budget but as long as they worked. These sensors were then wrapped around a piece of chucks cloth which was then sewed to the jeans. Wires were to be routed down the seams. Oh it all sounds so easy. It kind of would have been too, but first my multimeter stopped working. Well, more annoying, it was no longer a reliable continuity tester, it seemed one of it's leads was broken.

When I went to sew in the sensors, the sewing machine started to jam, and after a couple of hours of mucking around trying to work out just why it was jamming, decided to hand sew the rest. Now I was starting to get behind schedule so I opted to get some fabric tape to tape up the wires on the inside. Nearest service station, 8km. Living in the wops was getting on my nerves. I had a birthday dinner to go to, so that was it for Saturday.

Sunday, I taped up the wiring and started soldering the keyboard hack up. I'd opted to connect a parallel printer cable to the keyboard circuit board as, and make a connector at the jeans. This would allow me to unplug them and not get tangled up when demonstrating the project. It was all going okay except a few joints at the printer connector end did not want to solder, and a couple of wires at the keyboard end. Wishing I had the flux... Eventually I did manage to get everything except 2 wires at the keyboard end soldered, tested it, and everything worked. But those 2 wires then went on to cost me a lot of time. One in particular would not solder. To cut a long story short, my constant attempts to solder it, the heat must have spread to the integrated circuit and fried the hack. It stopped working. There was another old keyboard lying around so I started pulling that to bits, and went through the entire process of determining the keyboard mapping again. Except this time I had to make sure it fit the jeans that were already wired. Once again I had trouble soldering. Now, I'm not totally inexperienced with soldering, I've done quite a bit. But this would not work.

When I went to test it, nothing happened. At this point I was about to throw in the towel. Very frustrated at my lack of workspace, the fact that half my stuff is 50km and I can't find anything. It's all made this project that would otherwise have been fairly simple, into a complete nightmare.

However, I realised that I was testing it with my MaxMSP program that is only looking for certain keys, and my key mappings have changed. I tested it in a text editor and it did work after all. So I persevered and finished, set up the shoe part and then moved to other parts of the project... Like... The video demonstration. Ah yes,  I have my video camera but my Firewire cable in in a box in Auckland. So is the tripod. I have a digital camera though, it takes video, so I used that. It sat on a bench at a crap angle. Videos look like they are 15fps.

I made the vide, did a bibliography, made a reflective statement and.. came here. I've been up all night. It's due at 12. Everything except the visualisation is done, which I thought I'd have been able to do on Thursday. No Friday. No, Sunday... Oh and on that, part of the original visualisation was to have video footage in the background (under splotches of colour that blobbed in time to the music), but the internet got wound down to 56kbps so youtube was unusable. I'd tried to change the plan a few days before it happened but... nevermind.

Very annoyed, but I move into a new place next week. But I suppose then I'll be back to working in groups.

Update: I've been able to at least make a mockup of the visualisation in Premiere Pro.

Once I'm moved, I'll decorate this blog with pictures and video.