"working" prototype

This week we made huge progress building our NIME. The lazy susan came in and turned out to be amazing. It's strong enough to spin a person (as evidenced by the pictures of Meredith spinning me). We drilled holes in the lazy susan and mounted the plumbing structure on it, only for the whole thing to come apart again. Luckily John Duane helped us find better screws, and the second time turned out to be the charm. We'll probably still need to add some weight to the base to make it more stable, but it does actually spin now, at least at relatively low speeds.

The biggest obstacle we had to overcome (and are still overcoming) was creating a release mechanism for the balls. After extensive trials and failures, we finally found a method that we think will eventually work. We drilled a tiny hole in the top of each funnel and attached a spring in the hole. The spring was then connected to string and then to a ping-pong ball that blocks the hole from which the balls come. For the wooden balls and the ping-pong balls we had to attach two ping-pong balls together to block the hole. Ideally, when someone pulls on the string, the ping-pong ball moves out of the way and the balls are able to fall. To some degree, this system worked; however, we discovered that the tees and funnels are a little too large for the various balls. As a consequence, multiple balls can get stuck in the tees and then not come out at all. Our main goal for this week is to work on the mechanics to make this more effective. As suggested, I think our plan is to make the holes smaller with some sort of smooth material to allow only ball at a time to go down the tee. Our other goal is to further develop the game aspect and to increase variety in the sounds. I think we're going to check out some kind of plastic tubing to increase the length of time the balls are in movement and thus increase the duration of the sound.