Planet Arduino

Birds have an amazing sense of direction that aids in migrating across vast distances, and scientists think this is due to their ability to detect magnetic fields — just like a compass. Chris Hill on Instructables wanted a way to experience this for himself by using a sensor and some sort of feedback mechanism to feel a magnetic field’s directionality and strength. 

The sensor implemented is an AAH002 GMR module, which senses magnetic fields using a sandwich of materials that change their resistance when a field is nearby. By reading this value, the strength of the magnetic field can be calculated. Hill’s device employs a pair of these to accurately pinpoint the direction, while an Arduino Nano does the controlling. He also soldered together a set of nine ERM vibration motors into a grid to create a very low-resolution tactile display for the wearer. 

Once the wiring was finished, Hill stuffed the GMR sensors into an eagle puppet’s beak and the main circuitry in its chest cavity. Power is provided by a single micro-USB cable. As seen in his video, it looks pretty cool, albeit a bit creepy as well. Read more about how the project works in Hill’s write-up here. 

The post This sensory extension puppet lets you detect magnetic fields like a bird appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Imagine if you had whiskers. Obviously, this would make you something of an oddity in today’s society. On the other hand, you’d be able to sense nearby objects via the transmission of force through these hair structures.

In order to explore this concept, Chris Hill has created a whisker assembly for sensory augmentation, substituting flex sensors for the stiff hairs that we as humans don’t possess. The sensors—four are used here—vary resistance when bent, furnishing information about their status to the Arduino Uno that controls the wearable device. Forehead-mounted vibratory motors are pulsed via PWM outputs in response, allowing the user to feel what’s going on in the surrounding environment.

If this looks familiar, Hill is quick to credit Nicholas Gonyea’s Whisker Sensory Extension Wearable as the basis for this project. He hopes his take on things improves the original, making it lighter, more cost-effective, and easier to construct. 

The purpose of this project was to focus on the creation of novel, computationally-enriched “sensory extensions” that allow for augmented-sensing of the natural world. My major effort with this project was devoted to the fabrication and implementation of sensory augmentations that will extend a sense through sensors and respond with a tactile output for the user. The intent is to enable anyone to fabricate their own sensory extensions, and thusly map intrinsically human/animal senses onto hardware. Effectively extending our senses in new and exciting ways that will lead to a better understanding of how our brain is able to adapt to new external senses.