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Plaster Casting Day!!

(OMG!! IF you had any idea how much headache i've gone thru for the last 14 hours trying to get this post posted!!! just thought I'd share...)

I haven't slept much in the last two weeks!  the campaign is off to a great start!  but its all fun and games until you start making molds of your body parts!  that was the mission for the day; make plaster casts of my head and hands.

Uli Maier, a professional Prosthetist (person who creates artificial limbs for people), and I, met up at Mauer Park on Sunday morning. we "chilled" out briefly with mutual friends, Rupert's Kitchen Orchestra,before heading back to Uli's to get down to business.

My excitement comes from knowing that Uli knows his stuff. He knows exactly how to make sure that the helmet will fit perfectly WITH all of the electronics that are being created to mount into it, as well as the hand units literally fitting like gloves.  the concept was good before, but with his expertise in making prosthetics, it will be very close to perfect.

The process was two fold.  Create a plaster cast of my head and then create a silicon cast of my hand (we could only do one today as we did not have enough silicon to finish the other), which we later filled with a different type of plaster. the next step will be to make an "onyx head" sized doll head that we will use to create the helmet mold which will then be used to shrink wrap the carbon fiber around, when the time comes.

the process for the hand units will be similar but with a slight difference.  Although the helmet already has a semi-determined amount of space for mounting components, the hand units went through a major concept rethink this week.  I decided that the previous idea of having a chest mounted arduino based central processor was going to be tedious in a performance situation.  to much cabling and harnessing.  This system is being designed to feel effortless.  So I decided that each hand unit and the helmet will be individually wireless.  I found methods for creating a wireless "mesh" network, which means that each part of the system is capable of not only talking to the computer but to each other as well. Once the components have been assembled into a prototype, Uli and i will then create hand units that have enough space for them.  very exciting.

Most of this week will be spent working on the fingering system and getting it up to playable.  The rest will be spent in preparation for my show at TRANSIT (Schlesische Str. 35a, Berlin) this Thursday the 27th at 9pm.  I will be playing live with some new self created techy hotness then I will be using a seperate new self-created DJ control system to keep the party going into the night.  i "may" try to bring some of the TRON controller project with me to the gig and do a little show and tell.  let me know if this is something you'd dig.

Now that the campaign is well underway, please share your thoughts and impressions of this campaign with me.  I really want to know what you think.  If there are some things that i'm not explaining well, please let me know. and if you would really like to see this project go the distance, remember, it needs you.  The parts that have been done so far would not have gotten done without the donations of time, money and energy that the project has received so far and there is still a really long way to go, so if you've ever wanted to support one of my projects, this is definitely the one.  You will be very happy that you did.