First Prize : Chimaera

FIRST PRIZE

Chimaera: The Poly-Magneto-Phonic Theremin

Hans Peter Portner (Switzerland)
http://openmusickontrollers.github.io/chimaera/about/

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The Chimaera is a touch-less, expressive, network-ready, polyphonic music controller released as open source hardware. It is a mixed analog/digital offspring of the Theremin. An array of analog, linear Hall effect sensors make up a continuous two-dimensional interaction space. The sensors are excited with Neodymium magnets worn on fingers. The device continuously tracks and interpolates position and vicinity of multiple present magnets along the sensor array to produce corresponding low-latency event signals. Those are encoded as Open Sound Control bundles and transmitted via UDP/TCP to a software synthesizer. The DSP unit is a mixed-signal board and handles sensor read out, event detection and host communication. It is based on an ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller in combination with WIZnet W5500 chip, which takes care of all low-level networking protocols via UDP/TCP.

Original Article

(by Circuitcellar)