Sounds erzeugen mit geprinteter leitfähiger Folie von PolyIC

Hallo,

hier schauen wir uns mal an, wie man aus extrem kostengünstiger, weil gedruckter, leitfähiger und transparenter Folie ein 15-Tasten Keyboard bauen kann.

Die Folie wurde mir freundlicherweise von der Firma PolyIC aus Fürth, Deutschland in Form eines Musterbeispiels zur Verfügung gestellt. Der sehr gute Support dieser Firma ist ebenso beeindruckend wie das Produkt selber.

Auf der Maker Faire in Berlin 2015  habe ich diese Folie benutzt, um einen sehr einfachen Midi-Controller mit Lautstärkeregler, Pitchband und Panic Reset Buttons zu bauen, der mein Traubenpiano wunderbar ergänzte.

Dieses transparente Folie kann im Rollendruck in sehr großer Stückzahl und zu sehr günstigen Konditionen im Vergleich zu herkömmlichen Verfahren (Stichwort: ITO) hergestellt werden.

Wie diese Firma und einige andere  arbeiten kann man hier sehen:

Laser illumination for the graped piano

The graped piano was successful on the Maker Faire Berlin 2015

Children and grown up visitors asked me if it wouldn’t be nice to put some LED’s to the piano. If you touch a grape a LED should light up. This is a lot of additional hardware for 48 grapes and so I decided take an unconventional solution: Illuminate each grape with a laser beam when it is touched. So I build a hardware construction for a 2D laser beam prjocetion for the graped piano with 2 stepper motors, a conventional 5V  laser pointer and some buttons for moving the laser point in a square.

In this video you can see how I move the laser point from one grape to another manualy hitting a push button to move in x and y direction. Later the beam should be pointing to the grape automatically when it is being touched.

And here with a little more speed ->

Because I use 2 different stepper motors one direction (y) is very slow as the other (x) direction is nearly too fast for triggering manually.

Here a first test with 2 stepper motor drivers : 2 Silent Step Sticks (with Trinamic chipsets TMC2100)

Make the laser beam more save for exposing it to people without laserfilter glasses

It would pe perfect to do it the way shown in this product video from Phoenix Contact but for my little fruit piano it would be just too expensive .

Calibration test with 4 grapes: Test passed o.k.  Now it’s time to make a laser shield with 48 fibreglass connectors to the grapes. Then we make a matrix in the arduino sketch for positionng each grape. When a grape is touched, it makes a sound and is illuminated via DIY pof matrix shield 🙂

Hardware setup: Fixed the steppers on acrylic glas and connected the laser modul with a flexible part from a lighter (the black thing the laser is connected to).

laser_piano1
laser_piano2
laser_piano3

MakerFaire 2015 in Berlin – the days after

Yes, the Maker Faire 2015 in Berlin is already over and … it was really awesome!

Thanks to all the organizers and helpers who made this event possible. The graped midi piano was a full success. A lot of little and big children with their parents, young people and IT specialists found it interesting. Awesome was a word I often heard people saying. This makes me a little bit proud and very, very happy.

When I started to put the parts together for the presentation in Berlin I really wasn’t shure if it was a good idea to show that veggy-style piano to the rest of the world. It was not really tested deep enough. But surprisingly it ran stable the whole two days. Twice the system crashed completely and I will have to investigate the reason for that during the next days.

Especially the children had so much fun with it. The smaller the children, the bigger was the fun factor for them and me myself.
Here is a video with a small impression: A young women playing the piano as if she did it for the last few weeks. She played it better as I ever will. You will also find some explanations about the features of the graped piano.

georg_explain
georg_play
testing

Control 3D visuals touchless with Arduino

Inspired by an earlier work published on makezine (http://makezine.com/projects/a-touchless-3d-tracking-interface/) I have build another 3d controller interface with an Arduino Uno  and the bleeding edge version of processing (https://processing.org/), a visualization software for your hardware projects.

Download and install processing as described on https://github.com/processing/processing/wiki/Build-Instructions.

Build 3 sensors from old CD covers, aluminum foil and three wires as seen in the video. Connect the 3 wires to digital pins 8-10 on your arduino.

Upload this sketch with the Arduino IDE to your arduino.

Start your processing IDE with

ant linux-run (if you prefer linux os) or ant run (on other os)

in the build directory of processing. Download gm_3d_cube-150923a.zip into your processing sketchbook folder and extract it.

Open gm_3d_cube sketch in the processing IDE and (hopefully)…

Have fun.

UPDATE!  The company PolyIC® (http://www.polyic.de from Fürth, Germany) sent me some samples of their selfconductive films for testing purposes.  Conneted with an Arduino it is possible to control a 3D cube via processing, too. Many thanks to PolyIC®. You can see their products on the

DRUPA 2016

Poly IC on DRUPA 2016