Dizzy is a friendly looking teddy who actually watches your every move and makes everything it sees public.

Making use of the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO, we hooked up a PIR sensor to trigger a webcam capture event and publish the image to Tumblr.

patt-vira.tumblr.com/

Challenges

By far the most challenging part of this project was working with the API. Since it’s a lot easier to find examples of raspi projects written in python than in c++, we decided to use python. For example, the Tumblr API page has example code for python but not c++, adafruit has a great python tutorial for hooking up a PIR sensor to a Pi’s GPIO.

pytumblr is Tumblr’s official API client for python, but the instructions are unclear.

Python-to-tumblr Tutorial

epicjefferson.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/python-to-tumblr/

Source Code

github.com/epicjefferson/webcamToTumblr

This is my first time working with a raspberry pi and I am hooked! This project demonstrates the basic working of the GPIO Pins on the raspberry pi, using openFrameworks library ‘WiringPi’. I used three buttons as inputs to control the direction, size and color of a circle on the screen.

It took me a while to get in the flow of accessing the raspberry pi through ssh, but after I got that working the rest wasn’t too bad. I worked on the hardware and software separately and made sure that everything worked on its own before integrating them. It was definitely a good introduction to raspberry pi and openFrameworks.

For my second project, I created a controller reminiscent of the classic NES controller with three push buttons. This project aimed to expose us to aspects of hardware prototyping and the WiringPi library. In the end I created a demo “game” where the player could move Mario around the screen by moving left, right, and jumping.

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SILO from Priya Ganadas on Vimeo.

SILO is a silent tracker which senses people walking by.

Goal– The idea of the project is to make people realize life beyond their own bubble, by grabbing their attention while they do a routine act such as walking from one building to another. SILO gets activated by footsteps and prints out messages that can be related to any situation. These messages add serendipity to everyday life. Little creatures hide inside SILO and appear to see the person who activated them. They go back in once SILO is finished giving out the message.

Technology– SILO has a thermal printer that prints out messages, Piezo sensor to detect footsteps, LEDs, Arduino, Speaker phone and Servo to activate the little creatures.

Breathe was created to explore the dialog between people and their built environment.  The installation gives walls the ability to subtly communicate through the mimicked act of respiration.  The respiration creates an active dialog that changes with the character of the space. Breathe samples ambient sound levels and bases it’s rate of respiration on this data. High ambient sound levels lead to anxious tendencies of the wall panel, thus reflecting the living energy of a space.

Without noticing, we interact with our phones all the time. Whether it’s a tweet mention, a text message, emails, or an app notification, we are constantly stepping out of the real world and into the digital world. In doing so, sometimes we lose meaningful interactions that we could have with the people that are actually around us. We see this in situations such as dinner where everyone pulls out their phone to fill time instead of sparking conversation. My goal was to create a device that encouraged us to unplug and engage with actual people instead of tweeting the day away.

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I often find myself humming some made-up tune to the gentle whir of a room’s machinery in the background of my consciousness. What would happen if that whir became more pronounced, and the room started singing its own tune?

To accomplish this, I must do a few things:

1. Pick up the noise in a room with a microphone (the kind of which is undetermined)
2. Analyze the sound to determine the room’s base frequency. Continue analyzing that sound to determine if/when that frequency changes.
3. Create a never-ending tune from based upon the base frequency.
4. Send that tune into the room as unobtrusively as possible, to make it seem like the room itself is singing.

1. Pick up the noise in a room with a microphone (the kind of which is undetermined)

An [electret mic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electret_microphone) is my microphone of choice in this case. The one I’m using from [Adafruit](https://www.adafruit.com/products/1063) is pretty good, and very easy to use. Sound has always been this mystical, mysterious thing, but over the past year or so, it’s all coming together – and it’s all a lot simpler than I was expecting.

2. Analyze the sound to determine the room’s base frequency. Continue analyzing that sound to determine if/when that frequency changes.

An FFT algorithm helps compute the amplitude of all frequencies of sound wave getting picked up by the microphone. The one I’m using splits the audible range into 64 bins of 75hz ranges each.

3. Create a never-ending tune from based upon the base frequency.

Via [OSC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control) I can send the FFT-derived base-frequency to a Raspberry Pi running [Pd-extended](http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended). With PD, tone generation is as simple as connecting a few nodes, and song generation is just a little bit more complicated than that.

A series of specific whole-number ratios multiplied by a frequency result in natural harmonies: for example, the base-frequency times five-fourths results in a Major Third above the base; fifteen-eights is a Major Seventh.

Using this knowledge in combination with a basic chord progression and a little randomness, I can create a never-ending song that perpetually realigns itself to the incoming frequency.

4. Send that tune into the room as unobtrusively as possible, to make it seem like the room itself is singing.

There isn’t much to show here, and that’s kind of the whole point. I’ve embedded my system into the ventilation vents in the floor below. A [surface transducer](https://www.adafruit.com/products/1784) (speaker without a cone) transfers the amplified music to highly reverberant metal air ducts.

The bird antifeeder is a high-tech system that prevents birds from eating your food. You can see the above video for a demo of the system in action… The high-tech part is not true though, actually the bird antifeeder is a playful work that resulted from a combination of a short timeframe, a limited availability of resources (laser cutters on campus) and a need to quickly familiarize myself with a technology (piezo contact microphones).

I started the project knowing only that I had to sense something using a microphone and that I had to respond to what I sensed in some non-screen based way. Initially I wanted to sense ants walking on a surface and using this information I wanted to send a notification or give some kind of signal for people to become aware of ants walking on a surface which in itself is interesting because it is something we are rarely paying attention to. This was inspired by the much better and thoughtful projects by Prof. Ali Momeni. Again, because of the short timeline, for me this project was much more focused on learning how to sense using a contact microphone than it was about developing a strong concept.

Quickly, it became evident that sensing the walk of ants would be quite challenging with the technology I had, particularly because of the limited strength of the vibrations generated by ants walking which I intended to sense with the contact microphone. Despite having found a metallic material with nice vibrating properties, the task was out of the scope of the project because of how much more thought and testing would have been necessary.

With this information, I re-scoped the project to a much more manageable objective: to sense the vibrations generated by birds landing on a surface and to respond to this vibration in some way. This decision was taken after talking with Jake on the weekend before the due date for the project. After figuring out the amplitude sensing thresholds and getting a servo motor working, I set on to build an encasing in which all the components could be placed. The laser cutters around campus where all booked and the project was due the day after which is when I had to go back to the famous “its better done than perfect” which I agree sometimes with.

My arts and crafts skills are not super great though so as I continued to make my project’s box, it looked more and more like a ten year old had made it. With little time remaining and the idea that I wanted the project to feel like a unified and deliberate work, I embraced the child-like aesthetic all the way and decorated the project so that it looked like a cool addition to a kid’s treehouse.

That is the story of the bird antifeeder, a high-tech system to scare away the birds who want to eat your food. Lessons learned, sometimes it is indeed better done than perfect, humor is always good, follow intuition sometimes, if you can’t get what you need figure out how to make it work with what you got, keep in mind the scope of each project.

puts down mic…

NOTE: images are HD but for some reason not displaying as such. Click on each to see high-res.

Date: July 2014

Project: Light House

Creator: SOFTlab

The purpose of this installation was to respond to real time sound input from equipment and live performances.  It was the intention of  SOFTlab to create an environment which visually displayed characteristics of music being played at SONOS.  This project engages music in a very unique way that goes beyond a visualizer.  The complexity of the patterns made by the lights and the depth of input make the installation very responsive.  The complexity of the display, and how it physically relates to the sound itself is great aspect to further investigate and think about going forward.

softlabnyc.com/light-house/

Date: 2012 

Project: VERSUS.

Creator: David Letellier

The purpose of this installation was to explore sound as a constantly evolving system.  The artist wanted to create a space that started with one sound, but built the ambient sound of the space on top of each subsequent recording.  One side will record the other, and then play it back for the opposing side.  This creates an ever evolving loop that includes all active participants and the space itself.  The idea that the character of a space can be displayed and collected in a compressed auditory manner is very intriguing.  The idea of creating opposing components that build on each other makes it a valuable piece to study.

david letellier: versus a kinetic sound sculpture

Date: August 2011

Project: Interactive Robot Painting Machine

Creator: Benjamin Grosser

This piece of interactive art turns sound into a visual painting.  It was the intention of the artist to expand the boundary of interaction between music and visual art.  This project uses genetic algorithms to process audio data into a painting style.  This style becomes a evolving guideline for the image output.  The robotic system uses a controlled paint brush on canvas to generate the visuals.  This project displays a very unique way of processing audio input into a framework of guidelines.  Studying this project may be helpful to clearly define a relationship between an input and output.

www.wgsn.com/blogs/homebuildlife/innovation-art-design-the-robot-painting-machine