Three Blind Mice

Interactive Art, practically useless, so proper Art!

With the technical problems and concerns growing with every passing day while I worked on IMMobile Phone I decided that a backup plan was required. Where IMMobile Phone took tons of time and hard thinking, 3 Blind Mice occured to me in a flash. One of the toughest aspects of this work was getting a slice of tree, odd really when you consider the amount of people I know with access to a chainsaw.

The build was quite simple, I soldered to the existing switches in the non-optical mice (blind, geddit?) and with the assistance of Kim Mayne (Electronics lecturer) hacked away the rest of the gubbings in the mice as it was arguing with the switching. The original organ that I was splicing in got blown by my haphazard wiring so I used a smaller quieter organ to make the notes.

To work around the quietness of the new keyboard, I built a simple amplifier. Note that the resistor is variable so effectively it acts as a volume knob.

To see it working check out this video I uploaded to YouTube recently: (here)