After 24 days of running to the front door whenever I thought I heard the sound of the postman, my Arduino micro controller finally arrived. Actually, to be more precise I had to go fetch it because the parcel was too big to fit through the mail slot. Apparently, the postman came one week earlier while I was out and left a note saying I had to go pick it up at the post office. I never received that note and have been living a life of recurring disappointment for nothing! Anyway, I have it now and it is even more fun than I expected!
After doing the first programme ‘Hello World’ of the blinking light, I thought I’d live out my lifelong dream of clapping my hands to switch a light on and off. So with the help of the ‘knock’ tutorial from the Arduino website I got it done.
You can watch the video of my contraption in action below.
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/3020247[/vimeo]
Here’s where I got my inspiration from:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JSNOr6Btm8[/youtube]
Today I also had the fantastic opportunity to attend a one-day workshop on hardware hacking run by Chris Hand. I bought a £2 keyboard from a charity shop and circuit bent it. By circuit bending electronics, you can get some unintended sounds and behaviors. I unfortunately don’t have a recording of it, but it wasn’t tremendously exciting.
I guess this opens up a new category: { sound + arduino }
6 Responses to “Clap on, Clap off { sound + arduino }”
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i’m glad you’ve fulfilled your lifelong dream…the clapper thingy is seriously cool though. it be awesome for the TV though, especially since i continuously misplace the remote.
hehehehehee, hardware hacking just rocks, the other day I “hack” the smoke detector in my room, basically I attached a screwdriver to a stick and hitted continuously the small blipping speaker of the detector untill the “blip” became a tiny “tick” not anoying at all. soo that was hacking, hahahhahaa, or signal processing?? don’t know yet…
cheers
I love it…
Wolf, it’s easier if you just tie a little cable between your remote and your sofa.
Wow, nice.
However isn’t a threshold from the knock tutorial just a reading of the volume of all sound. Wouldn’t you have to analyze the sound to detect it is a clap not just a loud noise? is this what you have done, if so are you against sharing your code?
Nice work anyway, I am eager to experiment myself however I don’t have the skills to analyze sound like that.
Hey Chris, you’re right, it’s just reading volume. This is basic stuff that you can get from the ardunio.cc tutorials. It was my first little Arduino thing I did. So there’s no FFT analysis going on (to find a clap), it’s purely volume based.
If you bring the Arduino into Max/MSP: http://www.soundplusdesign.com/?p=1305, then it is easier to analyze the sound and decipher a clap from other sound sources. For that you’d use an external called [bonk~], which you can find here: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~tapel/software.html