Concept development

From my concept last week and the discussion from the forum I have decided to try and create something of an animal. The animal will react to different situations:

when it goes dark it will glow white
when you touch his head it will vibrate softly and glow green
when its tail is touched it will vibrate aggressively and glow red
when it is picked up it will vibrate quickly as if flinching and flash blue and yellow.

It will be put in a little cube and hooked up with a battery that will recharge with the group.
When with the group the animal will purr and pulse through the colour.

Components:

sensors spine - softpot
sensor light - photosensor
sensor touch - piezo element

reaction physical - motor
reaction audible - piezo element
reaction skin - multi-colour LED

My research so far has allowed this to happen except for the motor which is broken. I'm using a blue glow at the moment to demonstrate the workings of the animal.

video of outcomes

The touch sensing is alluding me at present but I'm off to get a new Piezo element tomorrow.

The image below is an option for creating the objects.

Final option is a munging of two things.

A crafty twine ball

http://www.bunnings.com.au/learn-how-to-diy_diy-project-centre_detail.aspx?id=111&categoryid=0

A crafty device called Twine

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-listen-to-your-world-talk-to-the-internet

The object would mimic the capability of the 'Twine' and look like the twine ball. 

Another development is the Capsense library. The capsense library is basic enough and easy to manipulate. One pin sends out a current another pin picks up a current and measures any changes in it. As a group we then hooked that up to the speaker which demonstrated that it was working. The issue is that it was so DAMN SENSITIVE! It was a very difficult thing to control especially when hooked up to a battery. It seems to take the electrical field around it when it is first plugged in as a constant but as soon as the base current alters it would freak out and stop working properly. Persistence is required and shall be applied.

Project proposal

Light Sensitive mood lighting objects.

Like the 'Air quality egg" I would like to design something that responds to the immediate environment of the user.

The initial idea is a box that responds to light, or rather a box that dims as it senses light and brightens as the light around it dims. The function of this is to provide an ambient light through out an environment that uses power only when necessaries. The other function it service is being highly mobile so that the light boxes can be place through out a setting and rearranged according to the needs of the user.

The features I would include in the box are:

Arduino
Photo sensor
LED (preferably a colour changing one)
Piezo Element (detects touch/ vibration and will scroll through the colours)
button (on/off switch)
dial (further control the emitted light)
battery pack
box (material TBC)

The product is not large on it's own but if you added many together and arranged them creatively you could create large displays as sculptural pieces within a setting.

Precidence to this Project are:

The light cube:
http://vimeo.com/31061149

http://vimeo.com/31285060

The difference with to the project I wish to attempt is that the box will be more refined and have a few more controls in it.

The items I'll need to investigate are:
- Interface
- Power
- Arduino Board (perhaps a nano or mini may be more appropriate).

Music

We are the Music makers.

Circ - 06 was nice and easy to set up, which was refreshing after the polava of the motor (which turned out to be a broken transistor). The first think I noticed was how annoying it was to listen to twinkle twinkle little star over and over again, so I endeavoured to create a drum beat.

The way the tuning works from the Arduino interface to Piezo Element is through the current going through it and making a little element inside the object vibrate. The faster it vibrates the higher the sound the slower it vibrates the lower the sound. This is how I created my drum beats.

Timing was really tricky as we put a dial into the mix and created a make shift for loop to control the speed of the instrument. We also had to make sure we stayed to a generic 4/4 timing so that if we did sync up that we didn't then play extra bars and fall out of sync again!

Interestingly I learnt that the Piezo element can work as an input also, as when it is reversed it will detect vibration. The principle is: as an output it has a current sent through it and it makes noise, as and input it is moved which creates a current which is read by the Arduino software.