When presentations go wrong...

So much for testing

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working furiously on a device for a presentation at emfcamp. Emf is a fantastic place to talk tech and meet folks. I was at the last one and really enjoyed it. We arrived at the camp on Thursday and yesterday I got to tell everyone about my “Chocolate Synthbox Synthesizer”.

I’d spent a lot of time building the device and after some careful testing in the tent in the morning I reckoned it was good to go. Fate however had other ideas. If you’ve ever done any presentations you’ll have heard of the “Demo Gods”. If they smile on you all will be well. If they frown on you, then get ready for trouble. The worst I ever had was a while back when I did a session in Amsterdan where every demo failed - that is, the worst until today.

The presentation involved me saying nice things about two technologies, sending MIDI messages to musical instruments using the Raspberry Pi PICO and using the Puredata program to make sounds. It hinged around live demonstrations of the soundbox itself. If that didn’t work, I was toast. It didn’t work. Worse than that, it gave the impression of working every now and then just to get my hopes up, and then failed when I tried to use it to show anything off.

The audience was great. They laughed at all my emergency jokes – that is until I ran out of them. I think they were entertained too, but not in the way I was intending. Oh well. You should treat every setback as an occasion to learn something. In this I’ve learned that you should always have a fallback position. Most of the other presentations I’ve been to have used videos to show things off, so I really should have had a few of them lying around to show off.

We’ve tracked the problem down to power supply issues and a broken speaker connection. I’m hoping everything can be got working so that I can wander down to the bar with it and show it off properly.

Apparently, to this day in some parts of Holland they speak of the time that everything broke for the idiot Englishman, perhaps it is OK to be remembered for something, even it is glorious failure.

I just hope I get the chance to present at emf again, so that I can show something that properly works.