Sound Box Project

Our project being documented.
This is our project being display to the public.

These are the buttons we use to make our rain sound.

Our sound box.

We had a workshop on how to create sound boxes. Cassandra and I had pair up together and created our very own sound box which we had recorded the sound of rain. The reason why we choose rain is because we tried to find a way to catch the people's eye. Since we had a hot week last week we decide if we made a poster on how the weather had been and tell them that its better to rain than to sweat then maybe it would attract the people to come and try our sound box project.

Street Art with Ryan Watkins-Hughes

Today we got an overview of a street art from Ryan Watkins-Hughes. Artists he discussed included Michael De Feo, Karen Walker, Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Swoon. Other projects he showed can be found here.

Below is an image from one of Ryan's projects - Shop Dropping.


One term that came up several times today is "meme". This originates from a book by Richard Dawkins called "The Selfish Gene". You can read the chapter about memes here.

Graffiti

To me graffiti is a drawings or words that are scratched, painted, or sprayed on walls or other surfaces in public places.

Graffiti is a passion for art and elution with different colors on the streets. the art represents who you are and what name you go by.

Sound Boxes / Physical Computing

In creating our sound boxes with Jenny, Carmen, and Mouna, we learned both how to construct a circuit from scratch and how to hack an existing circuit. Below is a picture of our breadboard in progress. The breadboards are very handy because they allow us to prototype rapidly, adding and removing components without having to solder.


When opening up the voice recorder key chains, we got to see a PCB, or printed circuit board. A PCB is used when your circuit is fully developed and you know you won't be making any additional changes. They're found inside of every electronics product. Below is an image of the guts of the voice recorder.



This is where the soldering began. We added our own reed switch to the contacts for the playback switch on the circuit board so that the recording could also be activated by a passing magnet. We also removed the connections for the battery and replaced them with wires that connect to the breadboard so that the circuit can be powered by our hand-cranked generator.


And Voila! A two-day intro to physical computing and basic electronics.

If you guys are interested in learning more about this stuff, there are some good basic tutorials on ITP's Physical Computing website, including ones on breadboards and soldering.
The Make magazine blog has many stories about Physical Computing type projects. Also, Instructables is a great site where you can learn how to build things. Instructions for the Personal Power Plant, a project by Jenny, Carmen, and Mouna that's related to the sound boxes, can be seen there.