Robots and Physical Computing

In a recent post ( First play with a SPOKE capacitive touch MIDI board ), I shared some first impressions of getting the SPOKE board connected, trying the web-based examples, and using it as drums in GarageBand. At the end of that post, I mentioned that the next thing I wanted to try was looking at the coding side of things., image taken from https://www.spokeboard.com/ Because the SPOKE board acts as a MIDI controller, my mind immediately went back to Sonic Pi . As I mentioned in an earlier post ( Spooky Hot-Cross Buns - Sonic Pi ), I have no musical ability at all, but I really enjoy creating with Sonic Pi—it is free, fun, and a brilliant bit of software. Putting the two together seemed like an obvious next step. For this experiment, I connected the SPOKE board as before, but instead of using an installed desktop app, I ran the web version of Sonic Pi ( https://sonic-pi.net/code.html ) straight in Chrome with no special set-up. This is a really useful option when you are working on a...

I have been having a first play with a SPOKE capacitive touch controller board. At the time of writing, it is available from Pimoroni at: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/spoke-capacitive-touch-controller-board?variant=56217676382587 This is not a full review, more a first-impressions note after getting it connected and trying a few of the web-based examples. The short version is: it worked, it was fun, and there was one small setup detail that was worth noting if you are using a mac neo. The SPOKE board is a capacitive touch controller. In practice, that means you can touch parts of the board and use those touches as inputs. One of the interesting things about it is that it can act as a MIDI controller, so immediately my mind went to sound, music, GarageBand, and possibly coding experiments later on. image taken from  https://www.spokeboard.com/ The place to start is the SPOKE website: https://www.spokeboard.com/ On the site, there is a very useful route labelled “Have your SPOK...