The remarkable Kelly Ludeking has finished the first of four tripods (trees):

First tripod assembled in garage behind Java John’s in Decorah

He will work on fabricating a metal box on one of the feet that will hold the battery and electronics. I don’t think I mentioned this previously, but in my search for a water-tight, cheap box which can be used to store the electronics, I stumbled upon the ammo can:

Load em’ up

It’s basically the size of a tackle box, easily secured and supposedly water-tight. Not sure if these things have been used to house small electronics before, but there you have it.

More about sound: As the structure you see above has three legs, I’ve decided to use three speakers on each tripod, hanging downward from each leg. The audio itself will have only two channels, but one of them will have an extra speaker, just to help sustain the sense of spatialization. I suppose it would be possible to use 4 speakers, one on each leg and one in the center, but for some reason, three seems to be the right number. Bruce Larson suggested having the third speaker wired in a “L-R” configuration–basically, take the positive signal from the two channels and send both to the third channel. It’s a cool idea, but as I experimented on Friday, the overall effect is pretty minimal, with little resulting sound. Once we have everything hooked up, I’ll try it again and we’ll see what sounds best. Since these speakers are fairly directional (and they will be placed inside cylinders, which will direct the sound even more), I’m not sure how much of the stereo field will be perceived anyway. And there will be plenty of ambient sound at Seed Savers, especially at one of the site locations, which is placed near a water pump that the cows can operate with their noses!