General Idea Description
Have you ever missed a button on your shirt? Or… maybe forgot to zip up you pants’ zipper? Well, dear friend, we might have the solution for you. Imagine yourself a smart shirt or pants which tells you when you missed a button.
Tools and Utilities
1. 1 I-Pac – keyboard’s main chip set
2. About 40m of electric conductor wires
3. Another few meters of electric conductor thread (for sewing)
4. CPU based program to analyze inputs made by buttons and loops contacts
Implementation
so…we set and try to figure out the code for our shirt and we realized it’s not that simple… The BIG problem was that normally, most of the computers and softwares can “listen” only to one key at a time, which mean that if we press the key and hold ‘a’ and then press ‘c’ – the computer sees the ‘c’ only (even it’s still being pressed) after many hours in trying to figure out how can we technically get over it? The real answer was: A Computer Game!!
let’s think of something… while we playing, we pressed many keys on the keyboard, mouse and sometimes with different input device (game-pad, joystick etc.)
So why won’t we use a simple computer game to analyze and debug inputs? We used Microsoft’s XNA Framework technology – The XNA Framework is based on the native implementation of .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for Xbox 360 development and .NET Framework 2.0 on Windows. For more information about XNA you can click here. Thanks to this technology, we can use develop our own software/game to debug more than one key input at a time. But, our troubles continue with a new line – now there is a technical issue of max input made by the keyboard at a time. It looks like we got to the edge of keyboard-computer capability, so at this point we can’t make to much about it and sometime the error sound that come out from the shirt is not immediate. However, it is the coolest shirt you could ware, and it can come with different set of sounds, such as electronic, ambient and classic. The Prototype, for example, implements and classic genre, based and a simple piano notes.
