DESIGN
Pilgrimage Project: Chaos Transmitters
The Pilgrimage Project was the culmination of the efforts of 5 different classes at Georgetown, including a creative writing class, a museum studies class, a remix theory class, and two installation design classes. The final installation took place in Georgetown's oldest building, Old North, and it showcases a mixture of projects that incorporated technology and highlights from the building's extensive history.
Each of the boxes I built contained an ultrasonic sensor, and Arduino, and a Raspberry Pi to transmit the signals from the sensor and Arduino via Wifi. The code I used took the sensors' readings (which usually reflect the distance between the sensor and any object) and converted them into a measure of the amount of activity going on in front of the box. These values were then transmitted to another room where a visualization (written in Processing) was manipulated based on the values received. In addition to the manipulation of color in the visualization, the values also controlled the opacity of two images superimposed on each other: one being a digital copy of a painting that was stolen from the building during the Mayday Riots in 1971, the other being a photograph of those riots.
Space Ocarina
The Space Ocarina is a simple, sound-emitting electrical circuit housed inside an Easter egg. It features a power switch and four buttons which alter the pitch of the tone produced by the circuit. My goal was to create an instrument of some kind, the main challenges of which were reducing the size of the wiring infrastructure and softening the admittedly irritating quality of the tone that the circuit naturally emits.
In order to soften the device's tone, I experimented with the number and placement of photoresistors in the circuit, ultimately settling on a series of low tones that fall into a minor scale between the keys of F and F#. To reduce the circuit's size to the point that it could fit into its plastic egg housing, I built numerous prototypes until I had minimized the number of connections required and free-soldered the wiring to the main active component (a 556 timer).
I succeeded in producing an entertaining toy but was even more excited to discover a serendipitous humanitarian use for the Space Ocarina. A medical professional touring our studio space at Georgetown saw the device and commented that it could serve as a therapeutic tool for her autistic patients. I gave her my prototype and she is currently testing its benefits in her own work.
VISION
My goal in building my VISION device was to create an alternative way for the blind, particularly the recently blind, to map their environments. Instead of sight, I used sound. The device consists of a knit hat with an ultrasonic rangefinder on its front, an Arduinbo Lilypad (made for wearable technology), and an earbud that allows the user to hear how far away objects are from them.
For this project, I needed to produce a tone that was extremely soft and non-abrasive, as it would be passed directly into the user's ear via the earbud. The delicate wiring also needed to be safe from being broken apart by normal wear, and the Lilypad version of the Arduino turned out to be difficult to program, lacking the standard USB serial connection found on many microcontrollers.
To smooth the tone, I built a Low Pass Resistor-Capacitor Filter, which only allows low frequencies to be passed to the earbud. This additional circuit, the Arduino, earbud, and all of the wiring were sewn into the fabric of the hat between its outer layer and the inner layer that makes direct contact with the wearer's head. To program the Lilypad, I uploaded the program I had written to an Arduino Uno and passed it serially from there to the Arduino Lilypad.
The device I ended up with produces a soft, even pleasant tone that is inaudible unless the earbud is securly in the user's ear. The tone's pitch increases as objects become closer to the sensor on the front of the hat.