Engineering the Engineers

Two Engineers are now working on the electronics for SIS: one, a colleague: a professor of Electrical Engineering Technology, Dr. Zory Marantz and a student engineer from the Emerging Media Technology Department, Remy Cucui.

I was a little apprehensive about this at first, since I am very sensitive to the management no-no of parallel work tasks and concern myself greatly with job ownership and proper credit. A team--even one as small as two--working on a creative project for/with me has the potential of opening a can of worms.

Turns out there was no need for the additional grey hair or two. The three of us met on Friday in my office and it was a hit. The ideas bounced back and forth, since one was thinking about a circuit constructed with a series of chips and the other was instead considering a micro controller to run the functionality of the components.

One possibility that exists in theory but could fall out of practical usage is that two separate sound bytes on one chip can be processed by the micro-controller and interleaved in real time as their sensors are tripped, rather than having two separate chips each outputting its sound data. But, alas, applying the theoretical may not yield the desired results, since the human brain [of the viewer] will process any sound gaps faster than any micro-controller can process the data. So excellent, so wonderful, listening to all this.

We were able to talk about other limitations: The depth of the photo panels themselves. I'm about to order the LED panel from China (which, the supplier told me, should come by air if I plan on showing the installation this year).  When that comes in, the sound unit's dimensions will be considered as it's designed. 

In the meantime, I still will get the muslin and mount the prints on paper. Reason for this is that I don't have any guarantee that I'll make my Kickstarter goal in September. If I don't, I still need the panels for the show in Trenton while I figure out what to do beyond. As it is, I'm cutting it close to fund the playback units with a research grant I won last year. 

I'll save my nail biting for that.