Software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
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The reason I want to stick with a crib over a bed or floor mattress (and I assume the reason most people use cribs) is that it keeps them in their bed during the time they're supposed to be sleeping.
Climbing out of the crib is mildly dangerous, since it's farther down on the outside than the inside. So it's good practice to switch a way from a crib (or adjust the crib to be taller) once they get to where they'll be able to do that soon.
Even if they can do it safely, though, a crib they can get in and out of on their own defeats the purpose of a crib -- at that point you should just move to something optimized for being easy to get in and out of, like a bed.
I do think it's possible to have low crosstalk with low damping. The problem is that my current design uses the same rubber (sorbothane) pad for both purposes. Possibly this could be two layers, first sorbothane (for isolation) and then something springing (for minimal damping). Or an actual spring?
I do think that would be possible, but then I think you'll also get more false triggers. The strong damping is what makes it so I can sensitively detect a pluck on one tine without a strong pluck on one tine also triggering detection of a weak pluck on neighbor tines.
I was thinking that finger muting wouldn't be possible, because the sensors are physically damped and there's no vibration left for your fingers to stop. Except now that you mention it, it might still be possible! It could be that gently placing your finger on one of them has a sufficiently recognizable signal that if it's currently "vibrating" and you do that I could treat that as a mute signal.
I don't think they are pinchy, since they are tight in their resting position?
Whoops! You're right! Will do.
Turns out I forgot to solder the ground and power pins! So they worked, but very poorly.
Combined with switching to shielded cable and swapping the piezo input from +1.65v to ground, it's working well now!
In our case I'm not worried about when they wake up in the morning, but about going to sleep, especially at naptime. A crib is boring and conducive to sleep, but there are a lot of interesting things to play with around the room.