1997

The Bomb

The first speakers in this line were developed as a part of Perry Cook and Dan Trueman’s N-Body project at Princeton University, which studied the emanation of sound in different directions from a variety of musical instruments. The first working models included the full-sphere “Bomb” and the “Boulder”. A slightly later version of a performance rig included “R2”, a spherical speaker built from Ikea salad bowls.

Most sensor interfaces take a range of voltages as input and convert them into a digital represention. One such interface is Electrotap’s Teabox. If you make your own sensors, or use sensors not perfectly matched to your system, you can usually improve the quality of your data by scaling your voltages into the precise range needed by your interface. In this article the focus will be on using Inverting op-amps to scale signals for use with the Teabox, but the same principles apply to most other voltage measuring applications as well. Although Inverting Op-amps are very effective and easy to use, they don’t handle high impedence signals very well (It messes up the gain). If you have a high impedence output you’ll need to use a non-inverting amplier.