Color, cables, vibration
Note: If you’re a Kickstarter backer, you can update your shipping address at the Spool website we set up, under “Account”. Some of you haven’t yet signed up there - if you don’t have the registration link we sent to the email address you use for Kickstarter, send us a message.
Here’s a material chip of the custom Twine Aqua color formulated for Twine’s shell. (Accuracy subject to the camera and your screen, of course.) A lot of nitpicking went into this — it’s not as easy as picking a color in Photoshop. We couldn’t find the plastics we’re using in a color that we liked, so we sent in one of our original prototypes to get color matched properly in PolyOne’s lab. They got it just right, in the polycarbonate blend and Santoprene we’re using for the inner frame and outer sleeve, respectively.
The UPS man delivered several thousand 3-foot cables for external sensors, custom made for us! Our sensor cables use four-conductor 3.5mm jacks, just like an iPhone’s headphones. While similar audio cables may work, we designed our own cables with better shielding — your ears might not notice a little noise in your music, but sensor data needs to be more accurate, and shielding maintains signal integrity over longer distances. We also took the opportunity to find a nice flexible white cover.
Our intern Tim has been fine-tuning Twine’s sensors. We humans implicitly understand when something is shaking or sitting still, but to an electronic device, it’s just a rapid stream of numbers that represent force. So we have to figure out exactly what pattern of numbers represents what a reasonable person would say is a knock, for example. Here’s a video of him testing the vibration sensing code. You can see it’s sensitive enough to pick up the vibration from a song’s vocals playing on a laptop. You’ll be able to set the sensitivity level to trigger an action when you want it.
As promised, we’re doing shorter, more frequent updates. There’s a lot of progress going on in general, but it’s just a lot of coding, talking with suppliers, and beta testing — stuff that doesn’t photograph well. We’ll be back in about a week with another report!
