Custom circuit design by Patten Studio

Patten Studio can design and produce custom electronic circuits for your interactive application. Below are examples of our past work.

Image of Ribbon Display

The Ribbon Display is a curved display surface measuring 100 feet long by 10 feet wide. The display contains 4000 lcd tiles. The driver boards above, designed by Patten Studio, do the heavy lifting of updating these displays 30 times each second using data sent from a remote computer. more info

 

Image of PICO

The interaction concept for PICO required that a computer be able to move small magnetic objects on a tabletop surface under computer control. We built a series of circuits to control this dense array of electromagnets. The circuit connects to a computer using USB and uses a 50V source to drive the electromagnets. Using PWM, PICO can position objects on top of it to within one millimeter.

 

Image of Sensetable

Sensetable is a general-purpose tabletop sensing platform that serves as the basis for many interactive surfaces developed by Patten Studio. It uses capacitive sensing to track the positions of objects on top of it. We designed the antenna boards to tile together to build a sensing surface of arbitrary size, and to function well in environments affected by electrical noise. The system uses very low power Nordic radios for communication. Sophisticated radio protocols were developed to allow the various parts of the system to communicate within tight timing constraints. The antenna board, tags and receiver are shown above.

 

Image of capacitive electrode array

Capacitive electrode array for tracking multiple finger touches over large surfaces.

 

Image of magnetometer circuit

HMC6343 magnetometer circuit with wireless interface using Nordic chipset and AVR microcontroller.

 

Image of wireless sensor node

AVR-based platform for prototyping wireless applications. Based on the Nordic NRF24L01, this board is cheaper and more power efficient than approaches based on Bluetooth

 

Image of serial interface board

For an interactive project which involved object tracking we obtained a large quantity of inductive tag-tracking circuits with a serial interface. Unfortunately, the only drivers available for these circuits were for Windows 98, and the driver could only support one circuit per computer. To track tags over a larger area, we designed this PCB to interface to the computer via USB, and drive four tag-tracking circuits. An onboard microcontroller handles scheduling and data compression to provide the best throughput while preventing interference between the boards.