Planet Arduino

Leyla is an interactive Niqab that reveals facials expressions on textile recreating the movement of facial muscles involved in smile and frown. The project was created by Patrizia Sciglitano and sent to us through our blog submission form. We got in touch with her to know more about it.

How come you started working at this project?

I started my BA graduation project in February 2012. I’m not Muslim but I’ve always lived in environment influenced by Islamic culture and I’ve been fascinated by it. Some months ago I participated to  a workshop in Prato about Wearable Technology with Riccardo Marchesi of Plug&Wear and I started to understand this new technology and to have real answers to my questions.

How does it work?
Leyla’s circuit is composed by two facial-muscle sensors detecting micro-facial movements. The Arduino Lilypad receives data from them and sends the processed information to the Nitinol wires (muscle wires)  that are sewn into the fabric,  creating curls of the expressions hidden under the veil.

Have you got yet any reactions from girls wearing the veil?

I kept working on my research project while attending an association for non-EU women in my city, organized by a Muslim friend of mine since childhood. I met several women there, both young and old who’ve helped me understanding better their culture.  I explained the project to them and from the very first concept ideas I received a positive feedback.
Not very often designers create accessories suited for their necessities and thorough this object they could gain more “emotional communication” capabilities while maintaining their decency and this new opportunity  made them very happy.
They were both intrigued by the new technology I showed them (muscle Wires), and on how I was materializing my new idea of communication. Muslim women thought that my idea was very cool. It was a chance to give voice to a new way of communicating their emotions without needing to “undress”.

Until now I haven’t had the chance to test “Leyla” in Saudi Arabia, although I would love to do it in the future. Thanks to a friend of mine, however, I had the chance to show “Leyla” to some women wearing the Niqab staying in Istanbul for Erasmus program: they even asked me if I was selling it!

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In the video and picture below you can see  the result, from left to right: Relaxed muscle – Contracted muscle: smile – Relaxed muscle – Contracted muscle: anger.

Pixelate is a Guitar-Hero-style eating game in which players compete in a one-minute showdown to see who can eat the most food in the correct order.

It was exhibited at Henry Moore Gallery, Royal College of Art in London:

A digital interface built into a custom dining table shows players which foods to eat and when, while the game detects whether they’ve eaten the correct food by measuring the food’s resistance on the fork. Potential applications for Pixelate include encouraging children to eat more healthy foods, helping to manage portions, and educating children and adults about nutrition. Built using Arduino and openFrameworks, Pixelate gamefies the act of eating, challenging players to consider whether they think before they eat, or eat before they think.

Inspired by the work of Munari, Montessori and her mum, Antonella Nonnis followed her personal interest in building tangible interactions and working children in general and recently  built an unusual diy pop-up book.

The Music, Math, Art and Science Electronic Book contains 4 pages that treat those subjects using movable parts and use a pull tab, a button and the electrical capacitance of the human body to activate sounds and lights:

The pages have been done using recycled materials that I collected during these years in London (paper, fabrics, LEDs, resistors, wires, foil paper, glue, cardboards) and it’s powered by two Arduino Diecimila, one that controls the paper Pop-up Piano and the other is for controlling the Arts and Science Page, while the Math page runs autonomously with 2 3V cell batteries. The two Arduino run with two 9V batteries although they are more stable if they run with the USB through the computer.

The book was completed after the successful experimental page containing an electronic pop-up piano, Antonella gave as a birthday present to her 6-year-old niece Matilde.

Take a look at more pics visiting Antonella’s project  page.

“Anastatica sensibile” is an installation created to study around natural processes as medium for interactivity. It was designed last year by the italian artist Daniela Di Maro in collaboration with the Software Architecture Laboratory of Milan.

The installation has been conceived around the properties of a specific plant species, the Rose of Jericho (Selaginella Lepidophylla): a desert plant known for its ability to survive in almost complete drought conditions.

During dry weather in its native habitat, its stems curl into a tight ball looking like a bare root, but after watering it, it turns green in about one day and that’s why some call it “resurrection plant”.

The installation irrigates  45 Roses of Jericho controlling them with an interactive system that monitors the number of people around the installation and activates watering according to it:

When the number significantly increases, one plant is randomly selected: the LED of the selected plant blinks for ten seconds. When a plant has been selected for a certain number of times, the digital system irrigates the plant and its LED is turned on […] An irrigated plant is excluded by the selection process for about four days, a time sufficient for the plant to regenerate itself and then to return in the “closed” state because
of the absence of water.

Two electronic control units  manage forty five LEDs and forty-five electro-valves, using an Arduino Mega microcontroller each, plus a specific, self-made Printed Circuit Board.

You can read the specifics of the project on this PDF hosted on the project page in the Bicocca Open Archive.

Last weekend at Fondazione Achille Castiglioni Massimo Banzi held a workshop called “Arduino and the light” where participants learned the basics of Arduino and created an interactive lamp digitally manufactured and designed by Habits Studio.

The Tinkerlamp was developed to be easily assembled the necessity of any technical notion: a single sheet of wood includes all the pieces to be mounted in interlocking, avoiding the use of glues.

All the files to produce the laser-cut lamp will be  are released with an open-source license and now will be downloadable from Habit’s website.

Even without any knowledge of electronics, participants  learnt and practiced how to add interaction to the lamp using Tinkerkit, a collection of different sensors and actuators to make prototyping much easier as you can directly hook them up to the Arduino.

Take a look at the pictures of the two-day workshop on our Flickr set below, click on it for bigger pictures!

When I was a kid I got into electronics because I started reading specialized magazines on the topic. At the same time it was hard for me to learn electronics from them because the content was not really “beginner friendly” and the projects were not very exciting. They were conceived more for people who were already into the technology and loved circuits than for explaining to newbies what circuits do and what you can do with them.

The way I really started learning electronics was when I received a kit as a present. It was called the Lectron System and was made by the German company Braun. It was a composed of cubes you could snap together magnetically to build different circuits just by following some simple drawings and instructions. The cubes were transparent so you could look inside to learn about the electronic parts.

The kit was a complete experience because it also had a book with great illustrations and simple explanations designed to look very appealing and make technology less scary through hands-on experiments. The original ad said: “Hey look, I just built a radio in two minutes” and it was actually true! Here’s what the kit looked like.

The most interesting aspect of this kit was …

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Sabato e domenica prossimi presso la Fondazione Achille Castiglioni a Milano, Massimo Banzi terrà un workshop dal titolo “Arduino e la luce” in cui i partecipanti realizzeranno la Tinker Lamp (nelle foto) fabbricata digitalmente e disegnata dallo studio Habits, resa interattiva tramite Arduino.

Il ricavato del workshop andrà alla Fondazione Achille Castiglioni.

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Global Sounds is an interactive installation by Rebecca Gischel. It is composed by a series of pyramids made of acrylic glass installed in a square in Edinburgh and each of them programmed to play different instrumental sections of a song when interacted with.

The composition, which was written especially for the project and includes a mix of instruments symbolic of different cultures such as the kato and didgeridoo, allude to the multicultural richness migrants have brought to the UK and Europe bringing parts of their own culture with them.

The song is combined of 7 instruments and 7 pyramids. At first, none of the instruments plays. When someone is standing beside a pyramid, one instruments starts to play. The more people come together, the more instruments join in. Each pyramid has a light bulb inside which is like an equalizer of one instruments. When there are at least 7 people playing with the installation together, the square becomes a play of sound and light. When all pyramids are working together, they compose an harmonic musical piece in its entirety.

Rebecca wrote us:

I used the Arduino Uno. I have one webcam with a fisheye lens on the top of each pyramid. I used the flob library + processing to detect if someone is standing beside a pyramid. If so, one instrument starts to play and processing gives the digital values of the equalizer to Arduino (photo ‘Arduino picture 1′, this was my first testing of the equalizer with normal LEDs). I wanted to use real light bulb instead of LED’s, so I build a transformer (photo ‘Arduino picture 3′) which translates the Arduino-Input into an 12V-Output for the light bulbs which are powered by a car battery. I used 7 pins, one pin per light bulb.

(in english below)

Se avete avuto l’occasione di visitarla, concorderete che la Fondazione Achille Castiglioni sia uno dei luoghi più magici di Milano, un luogo vivo, brulicante e allegro dove si respira l’amore per il design, per il progetto e per le persone.

Il 15 e 16 giugno prossimi in una delle stanze della sede della fondazione in Piazza Castello 27 a Milano, Massimo Banzi terrà un workshop di base intitolato “Arduino e la luce”, portando 15 partecipanti alla realizzazione di una lampada interattiva fabbricata digitalmente a partire da un design di studio Habits.

Dopo l’introduzione alle potenzialità di Arduino e ai fondamenti dell’interattività, Massimo guiderà i partecipanti attraverso esercizi guidati alla scoperta dell’abc di Arduino e di alcuni sensori. Nel resto del weekend Massimo lavorerà con gli studenti per rendere interattive le lampade e ogni partecipante porterà a casa la propria creazione al termine del corso.

Il workshop si svolge nell’ambito della mostra dedicata alla lampada Gibigiana disegnata da Achille Castiglioni presentata con bozzetti e prototipi proposti in una nuova chiave sperimentale. Il ricavato del workshop andrà alla Fondazione Achille Castiglioni.

Il corso è dedicato a principianti; non è necessaria alcuna conoscenza di elettronica e di programmazione. È richiesto a ogni partecipante di portare il proprio laptop con sistema operativo Windows, Mac (10.5 o superiore) o Linux. Su richiesta, sarà possibile pranzare in studio Castiglioni (a un costo di 20 euro per il sabato e la domenica).

Iscrivetevi cliccando qui e per ulteriori domande scrivete a fondazioneachillecastiglioni [at] press-office.co.

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Experimenting on light and interaction with Massimo Banzi

If you had the chance to visit it, you’d agree that Fondazione Achille Castiglioni is one of the most charming site of Milan, a lively and inspiring place, where you can breathe the love for design and for the people.

On the 15^th and 16^th of June Massimo Banzi will hold a two-day workshop (in italian) titled “Arduino e la luce” hosted in the rooms of the foundation in Piazza Castello 27 in Milan, bringing 15 participants into creating an interactive digitally-fabricated lamp, designed by Habits studio.

After introducing Arduino and the basics of interactivity, Massimo will guide participants into exploring the sensors and how to make their lamp interactive. Each of them will work on one lamp and is going to bring home the final result at the end of the second day.

The workshop is organized as part of the exhibition dedicated to the Gibigiana lamp, designed by Achille Castiglioni and presented in a new experimental version with sketches and prototypes. All proceeds from this workshop will go to Fondazione Achille Castiglioni.

The workshop will be in italian language and open to beginners, without any knowledge of electronics or programming.

Book your participation at this link and if you need more info write to achillecastiglioni [at] press-office.co

The Mood Lamp project by Vittorio Cuculo, is a system using interactions to communicate an emotional state to a physical object and receive back  a coherent response. In particular, through your facial expression you communicate your emotional state to an RGB color lamp . The lamp, at this point, will respond to the interaction by changing the color of the light emitted in accordance with the emotional state inferred.

The aim of the systems is to remove the mediation between human and machine typical of classic interfaces. Among the modes of natural interaction we usually have gestures, gaze tracking and facial expressions. The latter are particularly relevant because they play a fundamental role in nonverbal communication between human beings.

Regarding the man-machine interaction, the ability to recognize and synthesize facial expressions allows the machine to gain more communication skills, on the one hand by interpreting the emotions on the face of a subject, and on the other by translating their communicative intent through an output, such as movement, sound response or color change.

An IKEA lamp becomes a Natural Interaction system which senses human emotional states through facial expression. It uses OpenCV for image processing and analysis to identify emotional state through the movements of face’s fiducial points. The lamp, made with an Arduino Duemilanove, changes its color to represent the user’s current emotion.
In particular, it receives via serial communication, the values of pleasure, arousal and dominance, following the PAD emotional state model, as inferred from the facial expression and changes accordingly the color of the RGB LEDs.