1B – Arduino Project – Musical Plant

Group Members: Jenna MacCarley
Roles: Jenna MacCarley as Integrator, Designer and Scribe

Introduction

For this project, I set out to test the abilities of Disney’s Touche technology, which is described as “a new sensing technology that proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction. ” (Full Description Here)

I set out to use this technology to detect the subtle changes in touch and position of touch along the stem of a plant. Thus, the musical tones change and fluctuate according to where the user touches along the plant. The input to the system is this touch, and the output is the musical tones which are emitted.

Video

Technical Notes

For this project, I relied heavily on pre-existing libraries for the touche technology, as well as existing open-source libraries for gameduino (the audio/video shield). I created the touche shield found here and used it with the arduino and gameduino to convert the touche output frequencies into sound. So I did not write any code or design any circuitry (aside from slight modifications) and give full credit to the creators of those respective entities. All I had to do was combine these components and calibrate them slightly.

Photos

Note: Full credit for this diagram goes to ‘madshobye’ of instructables.com (source)