Mushroom Grass

Nothing is more enchanting than some music and a mushroom with grass that appears when you sing!

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Inspiration

Music has evolved in many ways throughout recent years. With technology advancing, people have begun to find more imaginative ways to use technology and other devices to enhance the musical experience not only through our sense of hearing, but also in touch, sight, feeling, etc. As musicians ourselves, we drew inspiration from common college items like LED lights, which many students use not only for asthetic purposes but also for stress relief. We wanted to find a more unqiue way of incorporating music into the STEM field while also helping students find a better way to relax that allows them to be more interactive with their music. Thus, leading us to the idea of Mushroom Grass!

What it does

Mushroom grass is an arrangment of assorted LED lights that is reactive to sound. The effect of the beat following flashing lights gives the user the impression of our center piece mushroom being in a changing field of grass or snow. While our video did not show it, students are able to change the color of the "grass" depending on their preferences. With this, students can be more interactive with their music. It not only serves as a light up speaker, but also a cute and creative way to "play" with the music.

How we built it

We built it by coding an Arduino Uno, using C++, to take readings from a small microphone and translate them into flashes on a matrix of LED lights. After first forming the matrix with rows of LED strips, we then CADed and laser cut a series of cardboard lattices to enclose the LEDs and give them a more pixel-like look. Then, using a 9V jack and barrel, we connected the LED lights to a powersource and watched as it flashed according to our voices.

Challenges we ran into

There were several challenges we ran into. Some of our problems included the creation of the hardware for this project. While we had some of the sensors and parts, we struggled to get the power supply to work correctly for our LED set up. Since the Arduino only could handle 5V, we had to use things like amplifiers and barrel jacks in order to give the LED lights more power to actually light them. As a result of this, sometimes the extra power for the LEDs would influence and overpower the commands from the Arduino. After much research, however, we were able to somewhat fix this after rearranging the pins so that the microphone would be read in analog rather than digital as well as adding transistors into our LED connection set up to easily divide and output the voltage needed after reading the data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of the accomplishments that we are proud of is getting the lights to at least flash in accordance to the beat. It was extremely difficult to get the microphone to work without interference from the 9V that was going to the LED ligts. So, we were very happy to see that it was working in the way we were hoping for it to work.

What we learned

There were quite a few things that we learned. One thing is how Pulse Width Modulation could be used to help power and send signals to objects. It was quite interesting to learn that one could simply make a signal with maybe less or more of a duty cycle and that this signal could be used to power things. We also learned more about Arduino and some circuitry.

What's next for Mushroom Grass

Originally, we planned to pixelate the mushroom into the board instead of drawing the mushroom. Additionally, we wanted to try and make more of a spectral analysis reactive system where each column would pulse up or down pixels rather than flashing the entire grid. With this in mind, we hope to move forward with this project and refine the circuitry and hardware to make this more appealing and look more "grass"-like.

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