status — student work. the final project for MTEC2280 "Ins and Outs", spring 2022. built, demonstrated for the course, and not in use since.
an object that sits on a desk and does nothing until somebody comes near it. then it wakes, and whichever image you choose, it answers with the music that belongs to that image and a pattern that moves with the music.
what it does
- wakes when someone approaches — a distance sensor, doing one job
- plays the music tied to the image you pick
- draws a pattern in real time that moves with the amplitude of what is playing
- lights the strip along its base with the same signal
- two knobs to change the pattern while it runs
that is the whole of it. the rest of this page is what it took to get there.
the sensor was supposed to be the instrument
the first plan put the ultrasonic distance sensor at the center: how close you stood would be the input, and the picture would follow your body. it did not survive testing. the sensor could not give a stream steady enough to drive an image with — the readings were usable as something is there and not much more.
so it was demoted rather than removed. it still notices someone approaching and wakes the piece, which is the one thing it does reliably, and the picture is driven by amplitude analysis of the audio instead. the two potentiometers and the mouse took over the parts a person actually adjusts.
that demotion is the thing I would keep from this project. a component that is unreliable as a continuous input can be completely reliable as a yes or no, and a plan that fails does not necessarily mean the part was wrong — often it means the part was being asked the wrong question.
the enclosure is cardboard and coffee cups
boxes, coffee cups, paper towels, latex glue and watercolor. there was no budget and no shop time, and the assignment was not about fabrication.
it looks like what it is, and it works. the point of a desk toy is that somebody wants to reach for it, and paper is enough to test whether they do.
how it runs
the Arduino reads the sensor and the potentiometers and sends them over the serial port to
Processing, which holds everything else: the audio, the amplitude analysis, and the
drawing. one microcontroller for the physical inputs, one program for everything that
happens on screen — small enough not to need a plan, and it is the same split every later
project uses.
where it went
this and sound reactive record player, from the same year, were the two course projects that fed into live audiovisual performance system the following spring. what this one contributed was the audio half — analyzing sound and turning it into something that moves — and the habit of letting a component do the one job it is good at.