keyboard interface

For this project we took apart a keyboard.completely striping it away to the control board and some soldered on wires, a good point to introduce multiple inputs into max msp due to a usb keyboard already is reconised as a input and it has over two hundred possible combonations,

For mine I decided to focus mostly on making a fine degree of control, instead of an awesome animation. the base was the same trees from the animata + appleremote task. added in extra frames to stop the trees from heeling over.

From playing around I discovered that when you had two terminals that connected to the same single horizontal plane cable it creates a value in the thousands. not only this but it has a seperate value for when button A then B is pressed and when button B then A is pressed. for example ( Q= 20, w= 26, q+w = 6676 and 5146 depending on whether you pushed down q or w first) this would allow for the sensor to be able to tell the program which direction of a slide was, which could be useful depending on the desired aplication.

My sensor was simple a cross using tinfoil as a thin conductor surface
it consisted of 5 pads. The centeral pad had no comand allocated to its individual press but when combined with on of the directional pads it would give a small add or subtract to the length value. in comparison when its just the directional pad it would give a movement value twice that of the shared pads.

Overall the task was quite enjoyable it was good getting to make something and having it work, I had more fun discussing the refinement other peoples work than my own. possibly since there was a dissatachement to this project, it fell a bit flat emotionly towards it due to the lack of strongly inspirational ideas.