Amir Bolzman shared a very exciting work that transforms the Snowboard to a musical instrument. In this post, a tutorial to reproduce his work is provided.

Materials
To begin with you will need:

1 x Snowboard
1 x Matrix Sensor 1610
1 x micro USB cable

Step 1
Let's begin!

Connect the Snowboard to your PC. Be sure that you connect the Matrix Sensor 1610 to the Snowboard.
Download and install Cycling74's MAX software. You can download a trial version here.
Download and unzip Amir Bolzman's firmware and software here.


Step 2
Upload firmware to the Snowboard.

In the unzipped folder, go to SnowMax-master\SnowMax1610 to find and upload SnowMax1610.ino

PS: You can apply this tutorial to the combination of SBFSR10 and single zone FSR sensors.

The Snowboard can work with 10x16 matrix sensor. The size of this sensor is 50.8 x 76.2 (mm) and sufficient for general tactile sensing application. However, for a tactile sensing application such as foot pressure mapping, a larger matrix sensor is desirable. We are currently selling a large matrix sensor for this purpose. The Snowboard definitely works with this large sensor but resolution is still 10x16. So, we are developing  a controller to support higher resolution for the large sensor which will be available 2Q.

Before the advanced controller is available, we would like to give you a simple tutorial to virtually build a large sensor with the Snowboard and the Matrix Sensor 1610. This is possible since you can run multiple instances of the latest Snowboard application.

Materials
To begin with you need:
2 x Snowboard
2 X Matrix Sensor 1610

Step 1
Connect the two Snowboards to your PC.

Step 3
Run snowforce.exe. You just double click snowforce.exe and then do it again.

You can find download the latest Snowboard software here

Step 4
For each instance of snowforce.exe, open an appropriate port and click start button.

That's all, now you can get force image data from both sensors at a same time. By this way, you now get a 101.6 x 76.2 (mm) tactile sensor.

If you apply this tutorial with 4 Snowboards, the overall size of the sensor is virtually 101.6 x 152.4 (mm)!

We are happy to announce that new Snowboard software has been released.

We fixed a lot of bugs in the Snowboard software and added new features to snowforce which is a visualization software for the Snowboard.
- snowforce comes as a standalone executable binary (Windows only)
- GUI controls have been added for a user to conveniently select a serial port and toggle data acquisition
- Bugs in camera control have been fixed. Zoom in/out and rotation features work flawlessly

We recommend that you use this version as soon as possible. You can get it from our download page

Previously, we posted two articles about how to use single zone FSRs together with the Snowboard (this and this). Although these methods are good enough for interfacing the Snowboard with FSRs, we thought that more compact and convenient interfacing was desirable. So, we built a separate adapter board SBFSR10 that can be used to interface the Snowboard with single zone FSR sensors.

Max 10 single zone FSRs can be added to this board.

Connection is very simple. Just plug the adapter to the connector for for Matrix Sensor 1610 on the Snowboard.

Now let's add three single zone FSRs to the adapter board. FSR 0, FSR 4, and FSR 9 are wired to (D0, A0), (D4, A4), and (D9, A9), respectively.

Then, upload this code to the Snowboard. If you installed the latest Snowboard library, then you can access this code directly from Arduino IDE (File - Examples - Snowboard - snowfsr)

After the upload, launch serial monitor by clicking Tools - Serial Monitor in Arduino IDE. When you press down FSR 0 (the 1st FSR in this example), you can see measurements values of the FSR.

Of course, pressing several single zone FSRs at a time is no problem. If you touch all these FSRs then the Snowboard outputs measurement values of the sensors as shown below.

Enjoy it!