Kate Casey Interactive Art II

Lots of Project Updates!  Shopping is (sort of) complete. I bought both types of shift registers x6, the jumper wire kit, and five switches. Why only 5? Well, I ran into an issue when trying to measure the distance between each key bar on the typewriter... There is a gear under there that puts some of the bars at an angle, and even aside from that weird gap, there is no consistent measurement for the ones that are parallel to each other. It's hard to tell in the image, but most of them are slightly different distances apart.  I hope I'm correct in assuming that this wont be a huge issue when making a custom circuit board, but when I test on the breadboard, it is going to be pretty hard to align a switch for each one of those bars. And with the switches being over a dollar each, I didn't want to spend ~$50 before knowing that they would work out, so I decided to only order 5 so that I can get a feel for the size and placement of the switches without fully committing. I know ...

 First and foremost, I have been gradually cleaning the typewriter, so I'm hoping the smell gets better and better as time goes on. I also ditched the suitcase that it had probably been sitting in for 40 years, so I think that'll help too.  Here's my cart on digikey that I made after watching the video. I'm holding off on adding switches until I can get some better measurements of distance between each bar - that will help determine if it's feasible to do a switch per key bar or revert to something else.  I'm also looking ahead to see what resources I'll need to build an actual circuit board. I found this youtube playlist, but can't tell if it's worth my time or not yet:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la5BafeXsUI  . There may be something better.  In class on Thursday, I started thinking about how to build the mail slot and what I might need for that, but I want to try to limit myself to getting the typewriter to work before I move forward. I think...