Hand Crank blues

Last night after the reviewing some basics about audio for video and recording, the Core group went to work on getting the small hand crank taken from a hand crank flash light as a control or trigger for an upcoming project of one of the Grad students.  The good news is that it does work as a trigger.  So, a success is good.  We would have liked to see a smoother stream of voltage coming from the crank though.  I threw the control change message (midi) generated by the Miditron into a patch to control the playback speed of an audio file ( my normal goto method of testing stuff).  With the the constant change in the voltage though, it made the audio unrecognizable in terms of what is being said.  I started with a "I hate this Fish" audio file which was not understandable at all.  However it was not uninteresting, which is good.  I later substituted a whistling file which was very musical and could be worked coaxed into something beautiful and maybe interesting. Next stop will be motors.

We did try inserting various resistors and an inductor into the voltage path with little effect, we were hoping to smooth the voltage gradient out a bit, not go.  Now I have to ping one of our supporting engineers again.