2026-08-07 · week 5
A body of noise, and a circuit with nothing plugged in
Met Khang: the physical prototype arrives next Friday (14 Aug). Two ways to keep working before it does, both without touching a soldering iron.
- A physical computing simulation stands between a body and the engine the way the real cup does. Open it: a grip and a heart rate pass through simulated FSR and MAX30102 sensor behaviour first, raw ADC counts, calibration bounds, an IR contact threshold, beat jitter, mirroring
cup.ino's exact constants. Fault toggles per cup (loose palm seal, fidgeting, never calibrated) rehearse the bench brief's open questions before there is a bench.
- A Wokwi circuit simulation (
wokwi/) runs cup.ino itself, completely unmodified, against a virtual ESP32, LED ring, and pulse sensor, no hardware required. It validates the firmware's own logic, not the interaction; the bench experiments (a real hand, a real seal) still decide the design.
Shared rendering (the cup panel, the flow layer, the presence/afterglow mark) moved into src/cupView.ts so the idealised system and the noisy one stay visibly the same artwork, disagreeing only about how clean the world is.
2026-07-13 · week 2
The deadline becomes the work
A decision: Circulation will not show at VFCD in September. The whole funded window, now to 30 November, goes into building the machine fully.
- The eleven-week sprint becomes a twenty-week build. The single-cup MVP gate moves to the end of August and closes with an internal pilot of about ten hands; September makes the triad solid; October adds the room layer and endurance testing and runs the structured triad sessions the paper is written from; November documents, archives, and shows the finished system to the school.
- What changes in kind, not just in schedule: the room layer stops being the first thing to cut, the dataset comes from unhurried studio sessions instead of festival throughput, and the deliverable is the machine itself, endurance-tested, documented, and archived for ten years.
A cup is held, not rushed. The manual, the technician brief, the report skeletons, and the paper draft have all been re-planned to the new horizon; the finished work then goes to the venues it deserves, ISEA and its peers, on its own terms.
2026-07-11 · week 1
Circulation made literal
Synchronisation is agreement; circulation is passage. The title's mechanic arrives in the simulator in two parts.
- The generating cycle (상생) now runs as part of the shared spec: Wood feeds Fire, Fire feeds Earth, Earth feeds Metal, Metal feeds Water, Water feeds Wood. When the held cups' elements sit adjacent on the cycle, light visibly travels from cup to cup in the generating direction, so circulation among others is no longer wall text but a thing the light does. Open the system.
- Releasing a cup now leaves a mark: the colour of the hold lingers and slowly fades, a cupping mark's days compressed to seconds. The room keeps a faint memory of who was just here.
The mark is sampled from the steady moments of the hold, not from the release itself, so the flick of letting go (which reads as Metal) does not decide what lingers. Only held cups circulate; marks receive nothing, they only fade.
2026-07-07 · week 1
The collective layer, and a way into TouchDesigner
With one cup's logic settled, the layer that makes three cups into one is next, and it is built to keep the cups independent of it.
- The sync hub listens to the three cups, computes the synchronisation score and the room colour, and republishes to TouchDesigner. Crucially it also logs every tick to a timestamped file: that record is the dataset the paper is written from, and the feed for Oryn's 계 archive.
- A set of TouchDesigner recipes lays out a path from never having opened it to a festival-ready show patch, one concrete result per week. The core turns out to be a single sentence: sensor numbers arrive as a channel and drive the colour of an image.
The architecture holds one rule: the cup decides its own colour and glows on its own; TouchDesigner sits above a system that already works, so a dropped connection dims the room but never darkens the cups.
2026-07-07 · week 1
The engine before the hardware
Eleven weeks to VFCD. Before any cup exists, the interaction itself is the thing to get right, so this week starts with the logic, not the electronics.
- The Five Elements (오행) mapping engine is written as a single specification: grip pressure, its trend, pulse rate, pulse regularity, and sustained hold read into one of the five elements and a colour. One spec, so the browser and the cup can never disagree.
- A live simulator of three cups now runs that engine, with a synchronisation metric and a room colour that blooms as the three converge. Tuning the mapping needs no hardware. Open the system.
- The cup firmware (ESP32, force sensor, pulse sensor, LED ring) is drafted to the same spec, ready for the bench.
The one experiment that decides the design: can the pulse sensor read a usable signal from a hand that is actively gripping? That is the first thing to test on the bench. If not, the reading leans on pressure and a brief "hold and be still" phase, which is coherent with the practice anyway.