Personal Projects Journal

Ingrid Pierre > Personal Projects Journal

2008 - Present

Digital-Analog-Digital converter

(D.A.D.)

Winter 2022-2023

What if my analog music collection and hi-fi setup could be more compatible with modern music streaming services and technology?

With the “DAD” interface, I wanted to be able to support my favorite artists more easily. By buying their music in any format, and simultaneously logging all digital AND physical media listening at the same time I can centrally capture all my listening habits.

I repurposed a cheap wooden desktop organizer I found at Target to house the electronics, and cut a piece of scrap wood for the faceplate and top of the housing.

In addition to working like an ordinary DAC (digital analog converter), the DAD also has:

analog volume meters
Network Attached Storage (NAS) so it can act like a giant iPod and give me access to decades of music I collected before Spotify and Apple Music.

Ingredients

hardware

Wooden desk organizer (repurposed)

Adafruit 5” touch screen

Raspberry Pi 4

IQAudio DAC+

VU Meters

12V Power supply

12V → 5V step down converter

¼ inch scrap maple plank

software

Raspberry Pi OS

Volumio OS

12V/24A power supply

12V → 5V step down converter

5V/3a
Raspberry Pi 4

12V/<1A

VU meters and driver

Painting with ink made from black petunias

May 2021

Furniture restoration

Eastlake Chair

January 2016

‘Johnny Mnemonic’ Charcoal, 2012

College Thesis: Destiny, Manifest

Harvard University, 2012

Visual and Environmental Studies

The Heart Sutra App

I designed and coded this app myself in Objective-C as part of a larger art installation within my thesis in Visual Studies.

Writing and copying the sacred texts known as sutras is an old and quite significant aspect of everyday monastic practice for Buddhists in East Asia. The shortest of these sutras, the Heart Sutra, is one of the most famous sutras in the Mahayana Buddhist canon.

This application allows anyone to participate in the act of studying and copying the Heart Sutra on the iPad. Use the app for meditation, recreation, or as the monks do (to gain spiritual merit).

Process

This app was the first application and exploration I had made programming natively with Objective-C. I designed the app to allow users to write characters in traditional Chinese without any prior fluency or familiarity.

At the time of creation, writing resources used primarily static image diagrams, so I borrowed from these patterns to create interactive tutorials for each character in the text. I took all 124 unique characters of the sutra (284 total) and produced character drawings, then assigned coordinates for each stroke and the direction it should be drawn.

Some of this was achieved programmatically, but the bulk of the vector graphics were made by hand. While the function of the drawing portion of the app was pretty basic, it also included some logic to ignore extraneous user input while drawing, the ability to undo or redo steps, and more.