The Design

Our goal has been to create a beautiful object without markings, with minimal design, that could be illuminated and provided simple but efficient visual feedback for the user, through full colour display.

We also wanted the object to be easily customizable and repairable, consisting of a minimal number of mechanical parts, and made using materials that could be recycled.

The AudioCubes consist of two cast acrylic shapes, which can be seen in the photo on the right. They are assembled by hand in our office together with the AudioCubes’ electronics. The material was carefully chosen to display a uniform colour using the cubes’ onboard RGB LEDs.

The design was drafted using a variety of open source software, such as QCad.

The Electronics

The AudioCubes have a portable, rechargeable battery-powered, ARM based computer on the inside, with onboard RGB LED lighting, USB power management and charging, and IR sensors and LEDs. The 4-layer motherboard was custom made, and went through multiple revisions before we were happy.

The IR wireless communications software, USB stack and sensor sampling running on AudioCubes was designed from the ground up, because we believe artists have unique needs, which we could satisfy best if we had control over all aspects of the design, hardware, firmware, and software.

The electronics are made in Belgium. The final testing, flashing, and assembly of the electronics is done in our office, by hand, board after board. Each board is tested individually to make sure we don’t ship anything with defects.

The electronics and battery are environmentally friendly and contain no lead or other harmful materials (ROHS compliant).

The Software

We wanted AudioCubes to work without drivers, and hot-pluggable, even during performances. We also wanted to keep the time between plugging something in and accessing it in the software minimal, and we wanted to make it possible to plug hardware in and out without restarting any applications or operating systems. We also wanted the communicaton with hardware to work at a very fast rate (1kHz) and with high resolution (10 bit), for users who need more than MIDI-level possibilities.

That’s why we developed a special user-mode HID communication library for AudioCubes, which gives independent developers and ourselves efficient and very fast access to AudioCubes hardware. The library is cross platform and works exactly the same way on Mac and PC. It’s freely available for developers who want to build their own applications around AudioCubes hardware. You could use the hardware for a music, sound, visual or game application or installation, …

On top of this communication library we’ve developed a Max/MSP external and several applications, all freely available and which work the same regardless if you’re a Mac or PC user. You can read more about the applications here. If you’d like to get the development kit you can download it here.