Project Diary: Overview#
Throughout the development of Stitch Synth, I tried do weekly documentation. To keep track of my progress, and also to keep my progress on track. I’m a procrastinator by nature and hoped that this would help me keep things organised (it kind of did!), and also because I wanted to keep a record of the ups and downs, the challenges and false starts, and the surprise discoveries.
In the course of developing a project, you learn lots of interesting things, and try lots of things (some of which work, and some don’t!). Inevitably, not all of these will make it into the final project, or into its documentation, but I wanted to keep a record of it somewhere.
Project Planning#
Because the electronics and the design of Stitch Synth were very much interwoven (pun intended) rather than being independent, the development of the project didn’t really go on a linear path where electronics design followed the physical design, or vice versa. It was more like
- January: researching different kinds of synthesizer circuits/designs and experimenting with textile potentiometers and weaving
- February: Deciding to make an analog synthesizer, prototyping circuits on a breadboard, making fabric grids to weave circuits into, and parametric design of resistors/sensors with Rhino/Grasshopper
- March: Figuring out how to move from prototyping to final product, last minute problems, and a lot of winging it.
Week by week process / progress#
I have written individual documentation pages for what I did each week, because there’s too much of it to fit in one long page.
January#
Researching different ways of making synthesizers (of which there are…many!) / Experimenting with weaving methods to make the interface part of my synthesizer / Thinking about different ways of making textile potentiometers
- Week 1: Exploring textile potentiometers and the vast world of DIY synths
- Week 2: Research: from textile relays to Sonic Pi
- Week 3: Experimenting with weaving
- Week 4: A good bit of thinking but not a lot of doing
February#
Building analog synth circuits / learning about space-filling curves / embroidering circuits
- Week 5: A frenzy of experimentation with textile potentiometers, space-filling curves and analog synth design.
- Week 6: Circuit and layout planning
- Week 7: A lot of electronics testing, transitioning from hard to soft circuits, and embroidering resistors (still a draft)
- Week 8: Transitioning from hard to soft circuits & laser cutting a fabric grid
March#
Need an image to go in here!