Collaboration with Kit

The show for Kit Plumeridge’s Isle of Plumii at Topanga Canyon Gallery was installed last week. I worked in the gallery on Sunday so I got to check out the show. It was cool to see where the progression of his work has landed. What started as a few steam punk instruments has morphed into an entire world with a full background story. There is a script and a video game in the works. He has several pieces in his show where I did the electronics.

The pinball wizard, where I added soundbites from the who’s tommy , LEDs, and servo controller flippers is there.

The steampunk Jukebox, where I added soundbites from several old novels, songs by one of his friends, and sound effects, along with LEDs is there. It also will play “what’s new pussycat” randomly at an average rate of once every 3 days. It happened while I was there. So good. Reference.

And the crown jewel, the ”village of the sun” slot machine is there. Last week I finished up the electronics on that one. Getting a pair of arduinos that run on different logic voltages to share a button was the final challenge. To solve this, I had the higher voltage arduino read the switch state and while responding to the button by spinning the wheels, it also changed the pwm on an output pin that was running through a simple RC circuit to generate a high or low voltage that the 2nd arduino could handle to trigger the sound effects/song and the led displays. That worked well but failed during the install. As a result, the 2nd arduino was outputting a steady stream of sound. After about 20 minutes of exposure to this (and 4 times through zappa’s title song), I had had enough and the volume was turned to 0.

We went back on Monday found the wayward wire for a quick fix. Now it is working as planned. Volume restored. New Easter eggs include a mooing cow and a tiny clip from Tom Jones himself. Looking forward to big reception for this show in the afternoon on Saturday the 25th.