Following on from post 1, 2, 3, and 4 on this project.

We met on Monday to take a look at the few modifications to the Filter Box and to see if they improved how the instrument felt and worked in the hand, we also looked at the Pressure Box.

Filter Box

A couple of the things we changed were:

Moving the force sensitive resistor (FSR) to the left which meant that it sits under the hand better and enables a natural pressure to always be present
Moving the light dependent resistor (LDR) to the back middle where the box hinges, at the bottom of a drilled out hole, so that the box has to be opened fully to trigger the sensor and it is not as sensitive to ambient light changes

We had a play about and made the following points:

FSR for now in much better position as is accessed automatically by hand when squeezing and can be used by finger too.
LDR in better position drilled down the back to give more uniform reading in changeable light scenarios- might also work to use a led strip so the whole thing is self contained- a nice feature is that moving towards the light can be used as a tool to give expression
might be nice to extent the functionality with an accelerometer so that physically shaking the box could be connected to audio parameters, there would be a lot of data to play with!
buttons still a bit dodgy- one is more flush to the box than the other so the desire is to overcompensate and push in the other one really hard. Will try the new bigger arcade style buttons, they are more rigid but have an easier action and less resistance when the spring is removed

Pressure Box

We also took a look at the Pressure Box and ran it into Max to take a look at its responses:

Needed more foam and perhaps a layer of more solid foam
The piezos are fine with short sharp hits but do not respond to long pressure pushes which is not ideal. They do give a response from pressure after idling at 0 for a short time, but not until releasing them. Kind of the opposite to what we wanted to happen. This might mean that the piezo is not quite right depending on the type of instrument we want to design sonically for. A more percussive application could work well as the response to this action seems to fit with the action itself, however if we want to be able to press down slowly over time then another solution must be found!

We shall keep exploring and testing!