spatialized umbrella on hackaday

Picture 1

Reader [Joe Saavedra] sent in his latest project: the spatialized umbrella.
The base of each umbrella rib features an LED, speaker, and distance
sensor. These are connected to an ATMega168 microcontroller running the
Arduino environment. The IR sensor triggers a rain drop sound based on
proximity. Shorter distances mean more droplets are played. The sounds
are generated using a lookup table and the digital pins. You can see
the demo video embedded below.

Using the Arduino environment without the associated board is part of another idea that [Joe] is working on. The MapDuino Project
uses the standard Arduino hardware for programming, but then transfers
the chip to a more barebones circuit in target project. They based
their initial work on the ITP breadboard Arduino.

http://hackaday.com/2009/04/12/spatialized-umbrella/

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really happy that this got posted. Best of all, they linked to the mapduino project on hackduino.org  .  This was my response to the comments and the post that i made on the site:

thanks all, for the great comments (even the “constructive” ones),
and thanks so much to Eliot for posting this! I love the idea of having
actual raindrops determine the attack, frequency and pitch of the
sounds, although at the moment I can’t think of the technology that
would get that done…

If I could just make one correction – I did indeed use an ITP post
as the basis for the HackDuino project, however, I am an MFA Design and
Technology student at Parsons, so Eliot, if you are reading this, do
you think you could also tag this post with “parsons” or “parsons MFA
DT”. thanks, again.

Josh is absolutely correct – MapDuino is completely top-down. There
was never a question of which came first – the microcontroller or the
breakout board. But it’s definitely something that is getting
completely overlooked, and along with LadyAda, Freeduino, and others,
we hope to continue to encourage this sort of DIY approach to the
prototyping process.