I like music, but I can’t play an instrument. I also like cakes and own an Arduino. So I put them all together to make a Cake Orchestra: a snack interface for music.
LDR version
Ingredients
- Light-dependent resistors (LDRs)
- Ordinary resistors & connecting wire
- Arduino
- Computer running Processing
- Soundcipher Processing library
Method
- Connect the LDRs to the Arduino’s analog pins using the resistors and wires (this guide will help). Remember to leave space around the LDRs to insert cakes!
- Get the Arduino to write its pin values to its serial port (this guide will help).
- Connect the Arduino to your computer running Processing and listen on the computer serial port (this guide will help).
- Pipe the values arriving in Processing into the Soundcipher library, making different instruments for each pin (the Soundcipher tutorials will help).
- Place cakes on the LDRs (use your imagination to help here).
- Remove your cat (I failed to do this).
- Lift cakes up and down :).
Ta-da!:
RFID version
I built an RFID version of the Cake Orchestra for the University of Birmingham’s Arts & Science festival.
Each cake had an RFID tag hidden inside. When they passed over an RFID reader attatched to the Arduino, the Processing sketch played a note. A special control tag toggled the instruments. Hardly any tags got eaten!
The code is now available over here.