For this project, I wanted to play around with space and orientation. Rather than setting my piece on the ground, I thought it would be interesting to make the art hang from above in some way. That led me to the idea of wind chimes:
In a classic wind chime, wind creates sounds as the movement causes parts of the chime to hit together. As a listener, the “unseen effect” lies in how the wind might hit the chimes, and how those chimes will sound when the wind reaches them.
I wanted to emulate this “unseen effect” with this week’s project. To add an “electric” spin on a wind chime, I thought it would be fun to make the “chimes” out of capacitive touch sensors and ambient light sensors, to detect when a person touches and moves the dangling parts of the piece. I wanted the dangling parts of the piece to be easily movable and dangle asymmetrically, and since the touch sensors had to be made of some form of conductive material, I went with a dark metallic color scheme, both for the chime itself and for the image on the display.
Instead of sound, I opted for a display due to time constraints, since I’d already jumped through many of the hurdles to get the display working in the last project. Initially, I wanted the display to show lines falling down the screen based off motion and touch, and LEDs to match that display. The LEDs ended up being more trouble than they were worth, so I stuck with just a display. The lines would vary in color and would shift across the screen according to the motion of the chimes.
There are two parts to my piece. The first is the 5 chimes, 3 of which are surrounded by aluminum foil and act as DIY capacitive touch sensors and 2 of which detect motion through ambient light sensors. Below are a drawing and an image of the wiring of these chimes. The capacitive touch sensors need only plug into functioning GPIO touch pins on the ESP32. The photoresistors require a circuit of 3.3V with a resistor going into ground from the side that is attached to a GPIO pin in the ESP32.
<aside> 💡 I learned how to solder for the photoresistors (thanks Sachi!)
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A drawing of the circuitry
How the circuitry (kind of) looked, pre-ESP32 frying