* Special thanks to Meng Shi and her lab mates who kindly allow me to hack in their lab.
I’ve been wanting to play with piezo and op-amp for a long time, so I took this project to try out something with them. And I decided to make a jar of star dust that comes into life when you blow it ( sending your energy via air to the stars ) that is kind of like a magic snow globe.
{ PART I – SENSOR BUILDING }
Inspired by the Piezo Powered Tambourine project in MIT High-Low Tech group, I realized I wanted to build something that’s purely analogue.
Due to the high impedance property of piezo, the current it produces by simply blowing (much lower than tapping) is so small that you have to amplify it – so there comes the op-amp!! After some researching, I found a digitally amplified blow sensor demo that’s based on this NerdKits Tutorials ( it’s a wonderful tutorial! ). After a long while learning and experimenting and getting help with Jiyan…here’s my very proud analogue version:
and it works like:
cutting pieces
