This post was made on Kelsey’s behalf by CE staff.
Hi there,
I’m a student at QUT studying visual arts and I’m currently involved in a project for the Green Hearts Fair run by the Brisbane City Council.
I am a total amateur when it comes to robotics or anything to do with programming or coding. What I thought was a pretty simple idea has become a bit overwhelming as I realise it requires a lot of knowledge out of my scope. It’s too late to go back now, I have 3 weeks to have a full project design and budget to propose to the council so… no pressure!!!
I’m reaching out for some advice and guidance regarding my project.
The Project
4x Wildlife nesting boxes each containing a mechanism that uses movement and friction against various textures and surfaces to create sound that emanates from within.
The nesting box is the easy part, I’ve made a design and prototype of that which is a fairly generic looking nesting box for a possum. The boxes need to be hung for at least 7 days.
I’ve made some 3D models of attachments that could be put onto a 12v hobby motor and spin, hitting or scraping against things on the inside of the box.
Similarly, my nesting boxes will be installed in Victoria Park (Barrambin), but in a smaller more contained formation than Machados’. The concept is about the unheard past, present and future voices of the park and commenting on the sites historical ecological and cultural significance. Materially, it’s a fusion of natural and unnatural worlds as the technology replaces the organic voices of wildlife. This is a comment to the ever evolving world of technology, and the need for co-existing with our natural spaces.
My roadblock is actually putting all the electronic components together. Simon mentioned using an Arduino set-up so they could talk to each other and be in sync, which is exactly what I had in mind. I’m not sure how to rig up the motor or even what a RasperryPi / Arduino is or does. I’m not sure where to start, what to buy and how to install it all to work.
As a backup I was considering reducing the complexity and having a few boxes with speakers that play simple sounds in synch and maybe only one or two with moving insides. I imagine that that still requires an Arduino but also that attaching a small speaker would be less complex than something with a motor.
I’m looking to start experimenting ASAP to have this project design made by the deadline, I’ll likely need at least 2 setups to ensure that I understand that the sync is working and I know what I’m doing before developing more. I’d like about 4 or 5 total, but I’ll have to see with the time restrictions as the fair is at the end of May. I would absolutely love it if you could recommend some products to start with, and some tutorials to follow that will help me through the process.
I hope this makes sense and I look forward to hearing from you!!
My names Jonny and my background is in sound installations and light sculptures for festivals in Sydney like Vivid.
I’m really like this idea; your nesting boxes give a flavor of life to the mechanisms and the friction sounds sell it to the audience. Good narrative; lot’s of interesting themes for the public to explore in their minds like “life from unexpected sources” etc.
Having a Backup.
I love that your thinking about a backup. That’s super important.
I actually have an important question:
Are the audience required to be quiet around the installation?
If the answer to that is no, the you will need some kind of amplification, even if you are using mechanical friction. Audiences are loud with their chit chat and stomping; your art needs some sonic re-enforcement.
I have recently been working with this small speakers. It will give you a natural sound that the audience will be able to triangulate to the right nest and sell the illusion. You will be able to hide it in the nest easily.
If you like this idea of a speaker, it will be very easy to resort to your backup, even if you only have a week left. In an emergency you can run to a shop and buy a cheap mp3 player. Load it up with some animal sounds from online and away you go.
It won’t be perfect, but being professional in this this art-installation world isn’t about the perfect product, it’s about guaranteeing a product on time.
Two Options
Option One : No computers required.
If I was running this install here is how I would do it.
I’d want the fewest number of components possible. It can’t break down on the day if it doesn’t exist; so If you don’t NEED it, don’t make it.
Let’s imagine you run up to your local $2 shop and pick up one of those battery powered fans.And then lets say you put that next to some sand paper so that it scrapes against it creating this rough herring sound. Easy!
Now all we have to do is amplify that.
Here is a simple amp that will interface beautifully with the speaker above.
And here is a cute microphone that you can plug straight into that amp.
Grab some machines that make sound and put it in a nest.
put a small microphone in the nest
amplify that microphone.
put a speaker in the nest.
If this idea seems reasonable to you, I bet you and the community here can come up with lots of tiny bots that make noise. Think about what you can source off the shelf that moves around and be hacked into an instrument. In this design, no computer is required, no code is required.
If you choose, some of your bots might need tiny amounts of code to get moving, but as we’ve explored above, you get to control how much code you feel your ready for.
Getting power into the nests.
You’re going to need some batteries and this should be no problem. Think about using 3 double A batteries, which you can connect in series to give you a little under 5V. Lot’s of cool electronics can be controlled with 5V.
Everything I’ve mentioned above can be run on 5 volt power.
Option Two: Using a Raspberry Pi 4
Fair enough Let’s walk through some basics together. I’m going to OVER SIMPLIFY this information. That means this information is Technically Wrong but Useful and Actionable.
A Arduino is a wrapper around a micro-controller. A micro-controller is just a chip. You tell it what to do in code, and then it does that. Mircrocontrollers are tricky to use so Arduino give you all these quality of life tools like
a USB port to plug it into a computer,
pins where you can connect wires like for a microphones
a super simple language to make it easy to code for it.
and much more.
However I think this project calls for a Raspberry PI 4. This is my official recommendation.
A raspberry pi is basically a tiny computer. You can plug in a mouse and keyboard just like your laptop.
I recommend this for one simple reason… It has a ready to go Audio Output.
You can plug in a speaker directly into the board.
This means all you really have to do is get some sound into it (like an mp3 recording or a microphone).
Playing that to a speaker is going to be easier than any Single Board Computers I can think of.
The raspberry PI has the advantage of being much more flexible. It will be able to control more complicated machines, and ultimately, devliery more fresh and intricate results.
A raspberry pi could control all of these wheels and horns in this cute starter kit below.
A Raspberry Pi could also allow you to turn on and off this water pump and you could create a make shift fountain with some rubber tubing and a pastic water bottle.
A Raspberry PI can even run this vibration motor in a glass cup of marbles for a klitter clatter tone.
With the raspberry PI you could write some code that turns these on and off, strong and weak. You could make this random, or even write an algorithm that mimics the tweets of birds in nature.
**Certainly a Raspberry PI will allow you to be more expressive in your installation. The custom robots, though simple, can surprise the audience with the unexpected. If you want it, go for it! You can do it.
Code
Don’t be afraid of the code, their will be enough material and support for you here and online. Instead focus on what result you are interested in and feel good about. Figure out what contrasting sounds and materials you want to work with (e.g. sand paper, water, glass etc).
TL;DR
If you want to purchase gear that will be flexible, I think you’ll have a lot of success with the raspberry PI,
The mouse, keyboard, and monitor config will be familiar to you and that will help creativity to flow.
However there is an option where you buy off the shelf parts and just amplify them with a microphone for the audience. For the record, this is the approach I would use.
You’ll be so surprised how strongly audience react to the emergence of usually quiet sounds.
You’re framing device, the nests, is strong enough to carry the piece on it’s own. Nailing it might be as simple as asking the audience a question… Have you ever slowed down and really listened to running water? What about pebbles rolling on glass? If I make it louder, and allow you to slow down and focus on it … don’t you think it sounds impossibly alive?
For power management, you might like to use something like the Makerverse Nano Power Timer, also available as a plug-in module for Raspberry Pi Pico, the Power Timer HAT
These supply power to your project periodically to conserve power - your project ‘wakes up’ does what it needs to do, then shuts down until the next interval.
These don’t work so well with eg. 12V projects though. That’s ok if you switch power to your motor separately, or use a 5V motor instead.
For producing sound using motors you’ll need some kind of motor driver. which will allow your microcontroller to drive power-hungry motors.
I’m imagining a topology that looks something like this:
It’s possible to drive a motor or a speaker from the Pico. To play audio you might want to use a kit that includes the hardware and guide to play .wav files directly from the pico’s memory or an attached SD card.
I hope this provides enough guidance to continue the discussion further. What do you think?
Edit: Jonny beat me to the punch with a lot more options I love our community
Jonny! Thank you so much for the advice and recommendations. I am eternally grateful and you’ve given me a lot of direction to move forward with now.
We have Arduinos available on campus currently, is it possible to still achieve the same/similar results instead of with a RaspberryPi? The movements / coding will be fairly simple and I think Michaels advice of using a power timer will be one of the ways we approach this. Lots of repetitive motions I think!
The marbles idea is great, thank you for that suggestion!! I’ll definitely be experimenting with different intervals and timing to bring some life and mystery into the nests. I’ll definitely look into sourcing second hand / recycled objects that can be installed instead of having to build something from scatch and risk it breaking. You’ve given me so many different options to consider and I’m feeling a lot more confident about this now 2 week deadline!
I have a question about overheating - these will run for most of the day and be turned off in the evening. I’m worried about the power supply or motors overheating and causing a lot of risks. What would you recommend to mitigate that?
Again, thank you for your input and super speedy response, I really appreciate it!
Thank you Michael for setting this thread up and for the great advice you’ve shared. This is definitely a process that I’ll be using and the drawing helps me visualize a lot!
A question about the motor driver: Will this help reduce the heat output on the motor? At this point I think I will have 2 nests with motors and I’m concerned that the long run time will cause overheating.
Thank you again for your advice and I appreciate your support
Awesome! If you already have access to an Arduino then using that is a great idea.
Getting audio out of an Arduino is a little bit of work is all. (in my experience).
Working around that is easy because your using bots, so as long as your happy with the sounds they make, you can work around this limitation.
amplify your bots
In light of the fact you have such a short build time I personally wouldn’t attempt to ask the Arduino to capturing the sound or control a speaker. i.e. no mp3s, no reverb, no signal processing etc.
Instead I’d let a microphone capture the sound and plug the microphone directly into a speaker.
Now you have volume, without the code.
All the microphone will need is power
let the Arduino worry about the motors and bots, let a microphone worry about the sound.
I whipped up this 5 min diagram in MS paint.
It shows how I would attempt 1 nest. You can scale this up
Maybe you have one Arduino controlling all the nests, or if you have access to more, you might prefer to put one Arduino in each nest. (kinda depends on your final design).
I’m actually not sure about this one. My intuition is that an Arduino probably doesn’t have enough watts to cause a motor to work so hard it overheats.@Michael can you confirm that’s accurate for most cases?
Heat is generated by loading the motor ie. resisting its rotation.
Provided the motor is not loaded heavily by the sound-making mechanism then minimal heat is created. Presumably the motor runs for short periods, or at least is not spinning continuously.
I wouldn’t be too concerned with motor heat at this stage
This diagram is extremely helpful!! I’ll use this as a bit of a map to work off. Is there a reason the Arduino is outside the nest? I definitely need to do some research, but it’s possible to run multiple of these off a single Arduino yes? Or will I need one per nest? Thank you for such valuable feedback I really appreciate you taking the time to explain.
In option one a single Arduino controllers everything.
It’s clean, simple, and if there is a problem there is only one thing you need to debug.
Option 2
In option two each nest gets it’s own Arduino. Each Arduino can talk to each other, which allows you to synchronize (which was one of your goals). This is the most complicated option by far, and will require lots of weird code.
However, it has a cool property… if a nest goes wrong on the day and you need to fix it, you can pull down just the nest that is causing the problem. Because the other nests have their own Arduino, they will keep working while you fix the broken nest.
It also means you can build each nest one at a time interdependently.
Option 3
Option 3 is where each nest has an Arduino which is responsible for it’s bot. There is a master Arduino which is responsible for co-coordinating. Some of the advantages of option one and some of the advantages of option 2.
Option 4
There is also a secret fourth option; but it involves a big sacrifice.
Here no nest can communicate with it’s other nest. That means no synchronization at all.
With that being said it now has the molecularity of option 2 which is really desirable.
It’s a compromise… but In a pinch I’d take it.
Audiences sometimes notices connections and patterns when none exist.
Have you ever looked at car blinkers and on the roads and thought they looked synchronized? Maybe heard a rhythms in the drip of leaking taps?
In this installation below I made this dancing sphere. I wanted some audience participation so I mounted a small camera that wasn’t connected to anything. That convinced audiences that the sphere was reacting to there movements. In fact the sphere jumps around totally randomly… but the audience didn’t need to know that
What’s right for you.
All of the options above are good choices… personally I think I would pick option one.
Unfortunately I’m not super sure where you skill level is at and what you will feel comfortable with. Trust your instincts
I’ve drawn up some designs to propose to my tutor to see what layout is more appropriate with our resources and time. Do these make sense and are connected to eachother properly? In theory, they should work? Please correct me if I’m wrong!
I’ll be working on putting all the components together for one nest next week so I’ll be sure to share my progress.
-A- makes sense to me
That looks good to rock and roll.
-B- has all the right ideas. Nice one.
Sometimes you have one motor controllers connected to two sound makers. Are those sound makers identical systems?
What I don’t know is whether or not the same motor driver can control two different motors of different types (). I remember @Jaryd made a beginners guide on different motors end of last year. Maybe he can weigh in?
Your motor driver will need a power supply (probably from Power Timer) just like the Arduino and Sound maker do. Your diagram suggests that the motor driver is getting its power from the Arduino. That will work for the driver logic (5V) supply, but not for the motor supply, even if it’s a 5V motor.
I love our community
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