MegaTap 3000

What it is:

The MegaTap 3000 is a pair of gloves that magnify the action of tapping your fingers into drum sounds.

How it Works:

Below is an image of how the whole system connects together. The basics is that we have a central control box
 which looks at the forces exerted on FSRs in the gloves. This information is transformed into MIDI signals sent 
to a synthesizer which creates the drum sounds. Serial information is also sent to a computer to help visualize the act of tapping.

Below is an image of the circuitry, with the gray line indicating what is inside the control box. We use a multiplexer 
to route the analog sensor data from FSRs since the 18F252 PIC chip has only 8 analog inputs.
The code which the PIC chip runs is here.
There is an extensive working site that documents all our sequences of code here.

There are two computer programs written to work with the glove using processing. One is a simple visualization.
 This program (which needs to be hooked up to our box to run) visualizes out play and menu modes. 
The other program is a game that challenges two people (each wearing a glove) to tap faster than each other.

How it is Built:

Below are photographs of the system. The first simply shows everything hooked up.
The second is a picture of the inside of the control box and how it is wired. Note that we are using a 9 volt battery.
  The last picture shows how we make the connection from the gloves to the control box. The box and the glove both have female Ethernet jacks on them. We use a retractable Ethernet cable to connect the two since the cord is very light-weight
(normal Ethernet cables are too stiff and heavy), and it stores easily.

MegaTap was exhibited at the 2005 ITP Fall Show and the Sony Wonder Lab.

Jeff LeBlanc: co-creator
Jury Hahn: Art Direction