Posts | Comments

Planet Arduino

Archive for the ‘installation’ Category

Feb
03

An Interactive Musical Art Installation for kids #ArduinoMicroMonday

arduino, installation, Kids, micro, museum Commenti disabilitati su An Interactive Musical Art Installation for kids #ArduinoMicroMonday 

reach installation

The weekly post on the Arduino Micro,  made in collaboration with Adafruit, is dedicated to an installation for kids made by Scott Garner, a designer, developer and craftsman:

Reach is a large-scale interactive mural and musical instrument created for the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh as part of the Tough Art residency program. There are no visible electronics, but when users touch both the moon and a star (either alone or by holding hands with others) a tone is played.

The Arduino sketch and PureData patch are viewable on GitHub and below you can watch an inspiring video of the “Making of”:

 

reach - Arduino Micro

Set
03

Interactive table turns eating into a videogame

arduino, food, inspiration, installation, Interaction Design Commenti disabilitati su Interactive table turns eating into a videogame 

pixelate_table

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.

PIxelate interactive table

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.

Giu
27

Resurrecting 45 Roses of Jericho with an installation monitoring visitors

arduino, Art, bicocca, installation, Interaction Design, leds, mega, plant, water Commenti disabilitati su Resurrecting 45 Roses of Jericho with an installation monitoring visitors 

AnastaticaSensibile

“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”.

AnastaticaSensibile

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.

AnastaticaSensibile

 

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.

 

AnastaticaSensibile

Mag
29

An interactive installation showing the exciting diversity of a city

arduino, installation, Interaction Design, music, music installation, Processing Commenti disabilitati su An interactive installation showing the exciting diversity of a city 

Global Sounds

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.

Arduino - picture 1

Arduino - picture 3

Mar
27

How close are we to doomsday? A clock is calculating it in real time

Ar(t)duino, arduino, artwork, clock, doomsday, ethernet, installation, shield Commenti disabilitati su How close are we to doomsday? A clock is calculating it in real time 

neurotic armageddon by  tom schofield

 

Tom Schofield created an installation artwork which visualises the ‘Doomsday Clock’, a symbolic clock maintained by an academic journal, ‘The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ which:

conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction–the figurative midnight–and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences that could inflict irrevocable harm.

The artwork is composed by two pieces:

  • a small computer programme running on a server which ‘scrapes’ the content of the bulletins home page as often as possible. The software checks the current status of the clock and then sends the results over the internet
  • a small wall clock which receives data and displays the time of the Doomsday Clock on a red LED clock display. This process repeats as fast possible so that the device shows in near-real-time the status of the doomsday clock. 

The project uses an Arduino Uno board and an Arduino Ethernet shield and the clock is controlled with a MAX7219 Led control chip. Tom published  all the code and design for the indicator in his Github code repo  and told us he’s  very interested in the possibility that other people might make their own indicators. So, don’t be shy and give it a try!

 


 



  • Newsletter

    Sign up for the PlanetArduino Newsletter, which delivers the most popular articles via e-mail to your inbox every week. Just fill in the information below and submit.

  • Like Us on Facebook