Oscillating and Resonating (day 243)

Leila and I spent the afternoon testing the LANC twin remote with the Sony TG1 cameras, then shopping for other cameras that would work better than the TG1s.   It was a futile attempt.  In the end we ended up with a nice assortment of chocolate from Xoxolat, and a singing bowl from Maiwa.  Not a bad day altogether.

So what about the LANC twin remote.  It works as advertised but our TG1 cameras have mismatched oscillators.  We have yet to do the precise calculation but it's somewhere around 1ms per minute.  This is a lot.  And it's hard to get them to be in sync at startup.  On average it seemed to take about 15 power ups to get a sync better than 4ms.  We may try to make the LANC 3D Master which is capable of manipulating the frame rate to compensate for the oscillator mismatch.  The 3D Master has an open source hardware design.  I have no idea if the TG1 are even capable of responding to the frame rate manipulation of the 3D Master.  There doesn't seem to be any way to find out beside making the remote and checking.

We went to the Sony store to see if there would be other cameras that we could test for a match.  No luck there.  The cameras we were interested in either had a design flaw which prevented the physical connection of the remote, or weren't available at the store, or weren't able to be taken out of the box for testing. We looked at Canon cameras too but none seemed to have a LANC connection.  Maybe their higher end cameras have this.  So we are a bit stuck.  We could go higher end but the higher end cameras tend to be bigger so cannot have a inter-axial distance of human scale. 

The singing bowl will be used to generate sounds and perhaps be part of the interface for the Breath I/O work.  We will go to Long & McQuade tomorrow and see if we find a tuning fork that will resonate with the bowl.  The bowl resonates at B Flat which a quick search reveals could be heart, crown, or solar plexus chakra.  There is an intriguing NPR report about B Flat which claims it can stimulate alligators to bellow, and is the note hummed by black holes (yes, black holes).   Guess that means black holes make alligators bellow.  There's also a nice bit in there about a room that resonates at B Flat (a room mode).  This site has an interactive orchestra piece in B Flat.  There doesn't seem to be any agreements on a mapping between chakras and tones which makes sense I suppose.  Anyway, B Flat sounds good for  now.

A song for this post.