Pressure Project 2: PLUR
Posted: February 22, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For each of my pressure projects, one of my goals was to apply at least one of my three passions to the assignment: Theme Parks, EDM, and Marvel. This pressure project is the realization of a popular cultural trend at electronic festivals called PLUR. While the trend is not as proliferated these days, you will still see individuals at festivals passing off their “Candy” bracelets to one another in an act of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect (PLUR).
The prompt of this pressure project was that a secret is revealed. This started me off on a brainstorming session in which I was trying to figure out a way to include electronic music as a revelation. My first train of thought was making a sort of puzzle that had to be solved in order to reveal a specific song. The thought of the acronym of PLUR popped into my mind as a discussion of the popular the game Wordle was occurring, prompting me to devise a system that required the user to get the configuration of the letters of PLUR in the correct order.
Another criteria of the project was that it included the use of the Makey-Makey. I went to my CAD of choice, SolidWorks, and began sketching a prototype housing and letter tiles.
My vision for the system was that each tile had its own unique spacing, so that it could only fit on one spot on the housing. Each tile would complete the circuit for one of the arrow keys on the Makey-Makey, helping to trigger a specific action within an Isadora patch.
The Isadora patch is arranged such that each tile correctly placed triggers an icon onto the stage. Once all 4 icons are triggered, then the secret is revealed. I chose to use a clip from Tomorrowlands After Movie, found at this link here
The point of the project is to introduce the idea of PLUR to others and also show off how incredible the European Music Festival scene is.
If given more time with project I would go back and fix the following items:
- Larger clearances for the tiles spacing. Although I factored in the accuracy of a printed part, I did not give the model enough clearance and was left to sand down some of the tiles.
- More room in the housing to fit my hand into to make secure the alligator clip connections. This got frustrating.
- Less of a focus on small details and more of a focus on functionality. I put extra effort into dimensioning the Makey-Makey to have it sit nicely within the housing, but due to the inaccuracies with printing, it ultimately just had to be haphazardly contained within the model.
- Have the patch play the main reveal on a second stage to the output monitor so that manual intervention is not necessary to hide the icons after reveal starts.
