[sdiy] ... Simulating a Moog

[Richard Wentk]

At 09:42 04/05/2004 -0700, Julian Bunn wrote:

>So there are these whiteboard attachments that digitise what you
>draw on the board so you can keep a record of it. Perhaps something
>like that could be modified so that you could simply take a
>rolled up plastic sheet printed with your huge control panel, pin it up
>to the wall at the location, attach the digitiser, hook to your
>laptop, align the system and then have it respond in real time to
>your stabs, strokes and twiddles of the printed knobs and controls
>on the printout?
>
>I dunno ... maybe it's science fiction.

No, that sounds interesting. I've never played with one of those digitised 
whiteboards (for some reason - heh :) ) but I think if you were looking for 
interesting interface technology today, that could be one place to go.

I think it's worth remembering that pots and knobs don't *have* to be 
synonymous. If you can get the same features from some other technology, 
there's no reason to stick to the traditional approach just because it's 
traditional.

I can imagine some kind of puck-based system combined with a plasma 
display. You'd hold the puck to provide position and orientation 
information while programming, and the display would provide visual 
feedback of the settings you wanted.

Or maybe some kind of stylus based system - moving it up for down would 
increase or decrease the selected parameter. With a big display you'd get 
better accuracy that a mouse, and very likely better accuracy than a 
typical pot too.

> > There's a laser based system that works for PDAs that's due
> > Real Soon Now
> > that works like this.
>
>Any details on that?

http://store.yahoo.com/ibizpda/vike.html

Apparently it's shipping now. No idea how well it works.

Interestingly, this is very similar in execution to a laser harp. But quite 
a bit cleverer.

I've been spending some time on laser scanner design recently (it's 
something you definitely can't simulate digitally - currently, aside from 
some very esoteric lab systems, you can only do it mechanically using a 
pair of galvos) and I'll be very impressed if they've managed to get a high 
scan speed, high accuracy system into something that small, and made it 
work reliably.

> > The T221 sounds great, but where can you get them for $3k?
> > Cheapest price I
> > found online was more than twice that.
>
>You're right: I was looking at a price quoted at
>http://www.ibuyernet.com/search~str~Monitors+LCD+22in~compare_price.htm
>which turns out to be a fictitious entry :-)

For £2k I'd perhaps have bought one. At £5k I think it will have to wait. 
Oh well. :)

Richard