I had a bit of a busy week in general - and we have also been making the new device – with all the new knobs, buttons and switches which took more time than I thought - but I've definitely got much better (and faster) at soldering. So, it wasn’t until Monday that I gave Matt this new version of the box to try out with the Pd Patch… I had thought this would be a fairly smooth upgrade – just attach the new manual controls to the patch…. Mmm… if only life were that straightforward… 

Meanwhile, Matt had also been starting work on getting the Pi to start up ‘headlessly’ – which means it just switches on and launches the patch without having to use a keyboard or a mouse – thus getting rid of the need for a USB hub … this had been going pretty well - until i presented the new hardware... eek!

So – it seemed that - a combination of the new hardware and various other unknown gremlins.. a few things stopped working, : ( … at one point, the Pi cards corrupted (and they take AGES to reformat – hours )…  It turns out that having lots more controls on the box caused a few problems for the Pi as there is a lot more data streaming in. There are controls on this from the part that Tarim made - so we did turn down how fast the data updates, but it still seemed too much at times for the poor Pi when all the manual controls are bring used - along with the sonar sensor...

So - during the course of the day, Matt did sort most of this out – but it took quite a long time – especially with having to reformat the cards a few times.  It turns out that now there is more work for the Pi to do – the preset section of the Pd patch keeps crashing it – so that will have to be taken off for now… but hopefully re-instated later in a different guise… things like this take a lot of time – as one thing that DID work stopped working as a new part was added… which I guess is the nature of all this kind of process.... Also - as this is still work-in-progress - Matt had given me a lot of choices and things to adjust as I worked with it - which would then get fixed down later - so,  for now - i made some choices for settings to try out, with the thought that it would be possible to change them if necessary but not so much 'on the fly'.

Although the Raspberry Pi does sound like a lovely, tasty and friendly computer, there do seem to be a quite a lot of unknown quirks hiding under the pastry crust.

So – I spent a lot more time cutting holes out of boxes and soldering things together so we had 4 boxes constructed to try out – and Matt spent the day trouble shooting. This did continue into Tuesday morning too – and I had a train ticket booked for midday to go to Bedford for Choir Rehearsal number 3… which was just a teeny weeny bit stressful (when mysteriously some other things stopped working at 10am) – but I left with 3 boxes up and running – hurray! – and left Matt with one to continue to work with.