[sdiy] Circle Machine prototype

[cheater cheater]

This is absolutely extremely cool. Can't wait to hear some sound demos.

Several comments and questions:

1. you mention interference between the lamps. Try adding small
matte-painted black walls between the separate lamps. Even better if
you are able to connect them all together and move them in and out -
then you can change how separate the lamps are.

2. different solution: take small plastic or sheet metal 'pipes' into
which you insert the lamps. Make sure those pipes are at the top
separated from the sensor by maybe 5 mm, and make sure the light
source in the lamp is maybe 1-2 cm below the top of the pipe. Then you
should get fairly good separation. Additionally you can move the lamps
in and out to change the separation

3. you don't want too much separation, or the sensor will go dim
between notes i guess :)

4. have you tried it with audio? I think that could sound like a
really cool low-pass filter. But again, I'm not really sure what the
settling time of such a sensor is :)

5. How have you made the arm? did you weld it yourself?

6. regarding your hammond vibrato - how did you make the parts there?
specifically the parts with small plates (i'm not 100% clear on how
the scanner works)

7. Do you think diodes could work just as well?

8. How fast does it go?

9. Can it go backwards? Have you tried a 'random mode'? :)

10. it's a bummer you can't get pitch perfect notes from it, but then
again, maybe that makes it that much better for other uses :) That's
not a reason to give up, much rather a reason to go on and extract
that feature imo :) you've got something really cool on your hands :)

Cheers,
D.

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 07:13, David Brown <davebr at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I'm sure it did.  I wasn't trying to build a faithful recreation - just one
> using lights and a spinner. It seemed like a stepper motor would be easier
> than a slow variable speed.  Besides, it gave me a chance to play with a
> stepper motor.  - Dave
>
> At 09:54 PM 8/15/2010, David Griffith wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 15 Aug 2010, David Brown wrote:
>>
>>> I've been working on building a working model of Raymond Scott's circle
>>> machine.  I thought it would be fun to build something with motors and
>>> lamps.
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> I was under the impression that the Circle Machine didn't use a stepper,
>> but instead a more mundane variable-speed motor and didn't have a skip
>> feature.
>> --
>> David Griffith
>> dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
>
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