[Cyborg] Sound-responsive dress

Eric Boyd mrericboyd at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 25 18:56:16 UTC 2010


I followed that like and it leads to another interesting project:

Heartbeat Straight Jacket (with EL wire, Stethoscope)
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=130

He uses a stethoscope and microphone to pick up a persons heart beat! 
This is something that I've always wanted to try, to see if the audio 
approach could work.  He says at the bottom:

<<
In practice, the microphone input is barely able to pickup the audible 
sound of a heartbeat. It works, but it's not clean.  When it did work, I 
find the effect really astounding! However in public, most people found 
a blinking straight jacket far more intriguing than the stethoscope 
'feature'.
 >>

Which isn't that encouraging, seeing as he was already amplifying the 
audio signal TWICE (once with the stethoscope and once with the 
microphone board).

Still, nice job!  Also, interesting observations:

<<
I learned that this project was more of a sociological experiment! A lot 
of people are rather timid about putting a stethoscope against their 
bare skin (no, they don't work through clothing). Maybe it's the fear of 
sterile, cold metal against their skin - the doctor's office coming back 
to haunt them. Maybe they're afraid of contracting a deadly viral skin 
chewing horse disease (silly). I'm not sure. The other funny thing I 
learned was that people can rarely find their own heart (oh no! I'm dead!).
 >>

Eric


On 10/25/10 12:38 PM, Sean Cusack wrote:
> Having a sound responsive EL wire outfit myself, I can say that the
> sensitivity thing isn't too hard to auto-determine. Analog sound
> response just uses a microphone in the middle of the circuit with a
> potentiometer (that's the slider) for sensitivity. It would be pretty
> easy to use a lilypad plus Skory's recommendation of doing some
> averaging and whatnot and putting out an appropriate PWM wave instead of
> using the potentiometer.
>
> Also, since you are using EL-wire, sparkfun has a couple EL-wire shields
> that might make life even easier. Here is a link to the cheaper one:
> http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9259
>
> Sean



More information about the Cyborg mailing list