Assignment 8 Looking Outwards – Rosey

http://makeprojects.com/Project/Laser+Harp/690/1#.UINILY6f-jE

1. Laser Harp

In this project, lasers are set up to point at photocells, and when the beams of light are interrupted, the Arduino sends a message that will turn on a given MIDI sound. Also, a range sensor will tell the position of the hand and change the sound quality accordingly. Though a somewhat simple project, it definitely has a lot of potential in terms of live performance of music – I can definitely see this being very cool at a big concert venue. It’s also neat that the website above gives step by step directions on how to construct your own basic laser harp. It would be kind of neat if you could make a show with it where the lasers would change colors, move to different photocells throughout the show to make different sounds, etc. I wonder if you could do a project where you position the lasers to points where doing some kind of dance routine would trigger sounds to play in interesting ways as the lasers are broken.

http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Twittering-Office-Chair/

https://twitter.com/OfficeChair

2. Twittering Office Chair

So pretty much this dude made a chair that tweets every time you fart. Though is sounds a little ridiculous (and it is), the method behind it is pretty interesting. He was able to use a natural gas sensor in combination with an Arduino in order to pick up the gasses that people let out. He then hooked it up to his chair so that every time the sensor picked up flatulence, it would automatically tweet about it. Despite it being a silly project, it really shows that with a little programming knowledge and the right parts, you can make some pretty entertaining things. It would definitely be weird but kind of interesting if you had a network of these fart-sensing chairs that could communicate with each other or something.

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-etch-a-sketch-clock-draws-out-the-time-erases-itself

3. Etch-A-Sketch Clock

So this is kind of neat since we’ve been talking about time and clocks in class a lot. This Etch-A-Sketch uses an Arduino and motors which draw out the time. Once a minute has passed, it turns itself over and erases everything to then draw the next time. It was definitely a cool idea to use an Etch-A-Sketch since everything drawn on it really does seem so temporary to begin with due to its easy erase capabilities. I also like that it is so accurate and neat when it it writing the time. It would be interesting to see something like this on a larger scale in a more public place so that passerby’s can easily see the time but the piece also functions as an artistic work.