soundie

A musical touch-sensitive light-up hoodie, created using the LilyPad Arduino, which is designed by Leah Buechley. Created at the MIT Media Lab for the High-Low Tech research group.

This hoodie is a prototype project for the Lilypad Arduino, meant to inspire other applications. The hoodie was designed with purely artistic intentions and with absolutely no practical applications in mind.

Want to make your own? Tutorial can be found at: http://www.instructables.com/id/musical_conductivity_detecting_light_up_hoodie/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• soundie
• musical
• touch-sensitive
• hoodie
• high-low
• tech

[Lights4Love]

could you possibly help explain how i might be able to make something similar to this but with no sound and have the leds be sensitive to sound?

[baileymcdoogle]

@Lights4Love In order for the LEDs to be sound-sensitive, you'll need a sound sensor of some sort, and you'll need to process its input and map it to the LED output you want. I believe you can use the Arduino Knock Sensor as a sound sensor, though I've never used it myself.

In the Arduino forum, there is a thread called "Help creating a sound-sensing LED display" that shows sample code for converting sound input to LED output.

Hope that helps!

[cindyandjoey]

One more question that didn't fit in the other box...I was wondering whether you, Leah, or anyone else has done extensive experimenting w/ different sizes and shapes of conductive fabric to see how they respond, and if there is a link for that somewhere?

[baileymcdoogle]

@cindyandjoey We have unfortunately not done any such experimenting, but if you give it a shot we'd love to see the results. As far as I know, different types of conductive fabrics respond slightly differently, but the difference is fairly trivial.

[cindyandjoey]

I built a test circuit using two 3-inch circles of conductive fabric. For right now they are connected w/ alligator clips (will anything change when I sew them down?). I'm only getting values down to about 900 though, and I have to wet my fingers and touch it because my skin is sooooo dry. (BTW what units is the 1023? 1023 whats?)

Is my only getting down to 900 because of the size of the circles? Or is it because the alligator clips don't connect them as well as stitching? Any other ideas??

[baileymcdoogle]

@cindyandjoey In general, the alligator clips don't work as well as the stitching. I had to reinforce the stitching across the conductive fabric to get a better connection.

1023 is just an arbitrary measurement, I believe.

It could also have to do with the type of conductive fabric you have - if you get someone else to touch it, are they able to get the value down lower? Also, if you use a large piece of conductive fabric, can you get a lower value?

[earthlyUpLink]

You go to MIT and this is what you produce?!

[MaryPoppinsMusic]

Can i buy one?

[youdonowme]

Heh well its still a cool hoodie.

[baileymcdoogle]

Hmm, that sounds like a really cool idea. Possibly doable, if I could take apart an mp3 player and knew how to adjust volume, etc with circuitry =).