Synthesising Touch: Haptic-rendered Practice Carillon

This paper describes the design and construction of a prototype haptic carillon baton, and mathematical modelling of the carillon mechanism. Other research which haptically renders the grand piano mechanism inspires analysis of the kinematic constraints of the carillon mechanism. Analysis is used to construct a physical model using Simulink. This is then implemented numerically in a Java application. A microcontroller is programmed to interface the prototype’s motor and force sensor with a desktop Java application, allowing realtime simulation of the computational model in conjunction with the prototype. A strategy for containing all physical model computations on an AVR Microcontroller is outlined; this is designed to allow stand-alone operation of the carillon, removing the need for any other external computing hardware.