The Unconventional Band

The Unconventional Band
Diagram of our circuit
Painting with copper wires

Inspiration

Our team was initially inspired by the integration of art and computer science. We wanted to combine our passions to produce a fun interpretation of music. The software component of our project was inspired by a blog post we found about using Arduino buzzers to create noise. We used code from this website as framework and then edited it to suit the needs of our specific project. Here is a link to the blog post: https://www.mrelectrouino.com/2019/08/arduino-piano-diy-conductive-paint.html

What it does

Our project turns a variety of unconventional objects, such as paintings into musical instruments.

How we built it

We used a couple Arduino Uno boards in combination with the capacitive Sensor open-source library to measure the capacitance of everyday objects. When one touches the connected part of the object, a change in voltage is measured and converted to analog values to produce a musical note in a buzzer. These objects can really be anything that can transmit current, but we chose to have copper-paintings, bananas, and capacitive gloves. The software we used as a part of the capacitive sensor processing was the Arduino 1.8 19 software application. We built our set up with these materials:

1 x Arduino Board 8 x 1ohm resistors 19 x jumper wires 1 x breadboard 1 x piezo buzzer Copper tape 3 x wires

Challenges we ran into

Each of our team members live in different cities in the GTA, and although we were able to meet for 6 hours, many of our challenges arose from collaborating and troubleshooting on the hardware and software remotely. Our code would work on one computer and not work on the next. We were able to work our way around those issues and use our back up codes, but if we had the opportunity to, we would meet up again and perfect our project to meet our original expectations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being that for the majority of us, this was our first time working with hardware, we are very proud of the fact that we were able to fully complete the idea we had in mind. We are proud of working with hardware for the first time on our own without prior experience as it made the project more challenging and enjoyable.

What we learned

As our first time working with hardware, we learnt a lot of the technical skills associated, such as reading resistor levels, wiring breadboards and Arduinos, and learning to retrieve the data we were measuring by integrating the soft and hardware components of our project. We

What's next for The Unconventional Band

Our next major step would be to fine tune (get it?) our project to produce musical notes. Our project currently uses a buzzer, but we originally intended to integrate a python, MATLAB, or java library with the Arduino to produce actual musical notes on our laptops. Other next steps could be to find more innovative conductive materials to use as instruments, and potentially control other things, such as LEDs, displays, and mechanism using inanimate objects paired with our capacitive sensors.