In this class, I group up with Divya Bandreddi and we built some musical instrument together.
The first idea I came up with is the color reader, while Divya had the idea to do a musical gloves, so we merged these two ideas and made a glove that can play colors. Here is a short video for this project:
After our first presentation in class, we noticed that this glove color reader has no significant difference from existing products on the market. So we started visiting some labs in ATLAS and looking for new ideas.
I noticed that building a musical instrument with Lego would be interesting, and our first idea was to build a Lego piano. We first thought is to do the simple way by close/open a circuit, then Divya proposed the idea of capacitive sensing and she did all the coding work. The code is shared here:
https://github.com/divya-band/musicallegos/blob/master/capacitivetouchlego
The first product we built is the Lego keyboard. Each key can be disassembled separately, so that users can build pianos that fit their own size and also color code each key.
We then showed this product in the class, and people suggested that there should be more possibilities for instruments built with Lego, not just keyboards.
So we spent another week on thinking some new product idea. I came with the idea to do a maze game, but Divya quickly discovered that the design was not feasible with capacitive touch. We even started looking at other idea, such as building instruments on plants. Fortunately, at the last minute I thought of this touch board idea. Click the picture below for more information about our final project, the Lego Touch Board.
Ruhan Yang 