Bum bum tan tan
Drunk Lamps is a synesthetic maker experience with music-responsive beer bottles.
Our team consisted of me, Clara Braem and Beatriz Magalhães. I worked on the coding and the circuit assembly part of this project.
Why we did it
Our physics teacher at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro asked us to create something based on what we learned during the semester. Our team picked "Sound Waves" as our topic of interest, since we wanted to play a little with music visualizers.
How we did it
I used Minim, a library for Processing capable of analyzing audio in real-time, to sort the input music into three different beats. Each beat could correspond to the frequency range of either a kick, a hat or a snare.
One of the first tests using Processing to detect beats.
We wanted to bring our project to the physical world. To accomplish that, we used an Arduino Uno, a prototyping board and 12 mini-LED lamps. Turns out we needed a lot more than that "Sound Wave" topic of our physics class to make the circuit work. But it did work, and we were able to successfully hook it up with our beat detection code!
It's all really fun when the code finally compiles and none of the parts are falling apart.
Since we were really short on time, we made a simple box out of wood and filled three bottles up with water. Of course, I took one for the team and made sure to empty up all of the beer bottles real nice. :)
We even got to showcase our work at HackPUC, our university's technology expo! Note: the black coverings are because of the excess of sunlight interfering with our lightning. No NDAs needed this time. ;)
