MIDTERM PROGRESS
Our initial plan was to combine in self contained units, a mini arduino, a zigbee and a speaker in order to broadcast each other's presence through music. The idea was to play a simple tune while noone was around or when only one radio was on the floor but as more people in our group appeared on the floor it would play a more complex tune.
We first wrote the arduino program that would check for the presence of the other radios, since their program would broadcast a 1, 2, 3, or 4 when turned on. We soon ran into some technical difficulties of running the part of the program that played notes at the same time as the broadcasting, in fact it seemed as though the delays present and necessary to play the notes on the arduino PWM pin, would actually stall and block anything else from happening.
We then decided to use a digital pot AD5206 to control an oscillator chip to actually produce the notes. That seemed to work, but ones interfaced with the Zigbee wasn't working properly and it still needed an amp of some sort, therefore making the idea of a wearable completely impossible.
We then decided after investing a lot of time into this option, to opt for a base central station hooked up to a computer running a patch in Max MSP that would listen to the serial and expect 5 bytes, 4 of which represented the presence (1 or 49) or absence (0 or 48) from the Arduino base station. It then used each ON radio to trigger a different instrument.
Close up of one of the small now wearable radio circuits.
And a cute casing for it.
