Human Wind Chime – Development
Further to the posts in week 6,7, and 8, we further developed our Human Wind Chime media controller, with our main focus being on:
- finishing the material parts: balls, hanging plate
- refining the piezo sensors and code to get the readings to be more reliable and stable
- get our multiplexors to work with 25 sensors and 25 LEDs
Using matt spray to get the balls to glow better
The hanging plate being installed
wind chime development from Patricia Adler on Vimeo.
The nuts and bolts of making the Human Wind Chime
Team effort putting it all together
What a team ... still smiling at 1am ...!
Et Voilá!
Well almost … everything was looking great at that point, except we realised that our multiplexers were not doing what we wanted them to do – in fact we managed to ‘fry’ three of our arduino multi processors whilst trying to figure things out with our code and set-up.
Long story short, we rewired our entire board as our earlier version was somewhat messy – with long wires etc, which just asks for a short and makes it impossible to spot any errors. 3 hours later …
Our VERY NEATLY rewired boards using four multiplexers
Despite our efforts to make the multiplexers work, we ultimately abandoned them in the last minute just to make sure we were able to show a working project in class – after all, it is the user experience that matters and not the technology behind it, and we knew that we could make this work using 5 arduinos instead of just using one with 4 multiplexers. And that is what we ultimately did.
(see the final video in the final posting).