I’ve dubbed the project with the DDR dance mats the Rumbler Project, and I actually mostly fixed the sound playback issue I was having last week. There is still a lot more work to be done with the audio module, but it works and is fairly simple in usage.

I did find that, while the concept is kind of fun in a “ooh that’s neat” kind of way, it’s too hard to actually use the mats to produce some kind of music. So this week I’m going to introduce a basic rhythm system – pushing a button starts a sound and a timer, and pushing it a second time will play the sound again and indicate the end-of-loop time. Here, the sound starts to loop with the timing that the user has provided himself, freeing his feet up for more stuff.

Doing this should make it easier to make music, although the users’ control becomes less immediate. We’ll see how it works out in the end. If all goes well I may add a lot more sounds and start improving the layout-to-sound mappings to ‘feel more natural’.