Ultra Helper

Posted by admin on February 1st, 2008 filed in I and I, art, openness

I’ve been working on another version of the Little Helpers.
More information on the project can be found by following the link above, but briefly: the idea behind the Little Helpers is to create a number of autonomous devices that force a resonance in an object or surface through vibrations. As people enter a space in which the Little Helpers are installed their movements result in a forced resonance, drawing attention to the audible qualities of the environment around them and to the fact that things sound. The hope is that this will spur on small performances and result in a heightened awareness of ‘auditory environments’ in general. By building individual, autonomous devices, there is little need any heavy technology, central computer or infrastructure. The Little Helpers can therefore be installed outside of traditional gallery environments: on scaffoldings around cities, in parks, hall ways, kitchens…

The older version, which used an in-built mic as a sensor, worked but the sensitivity wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped. In building the newer version I’ve realised that this will, in part at least, have been due to a lot of noise in the circuit coming back off the motor, despite a snubber diode. This ultrasound version has a greater sensitivity and is easier to calibrate in many ways. The ATMEGA8 chip which runs everything (mapping the distances reported by the ultrasound onto the speed of the motor) is programmed using the arduino IDE and then removed from the arduino’s cumbersome housing and installed onto the breadboard to cut down on size. Thanks to Tom Igoe’s instructions, it’s a quick and easy job to get this ’standalone’ arduino style system up and running. The next stage is to solder it all onto a board, then to construct some housing (and then repeat 25 times…..).

Along the way I had a go at getting SuperCollider controlling motors via a similar system (minus the ultrasound stuff). I built a small patch and circuit that allows you to turn motors on and off by either executing lines of code or using amplitude analysis to trigger a motor once a threshold is crossed. Just in case anyone is interested in doing something similar the code is available here: SuperCollider | Arduino. The circuit can be set up by following this tutorial.