I'm working on a project using piano wire to generate sounds relative to a viewer's position. The actual fine-tuning and practical creation of the sound if something that can only really come from experimenting with different tensions, methods of resonation etc.......
BUT, as a fair-to-middling Arduino and programming noob, I have quite a few technical questions to process before I get to that stage...!
The overall plan is to have the wires resonate with increasing volume as a viewer gets closer to them (probably through the use of plucking / hammering the wires with a scanner motor, as I can't really think of a better / safer way to do it). As there will be 4 or 5 different piano wires - and therefore 4 or 5 different coordinates of importance - this would also mean that if a viewer is equidistant between two wires, they would both resonate at the same pitch, or if there were more than one viewer, more wires would resonate, etc etc.
I was wondering if anyone could recommend a blob tracker library - presumably for Processing? - that would be capable of this. I've had a look around, but they mostly seem to be based around visual output, which is not what I'm after really.
Also, any other insight on how to go about this from an electronics point of view would be great. I'm unsure whether to use / whether I'll have to use several Arduinos with XBee shields, or if there is a better way to do it.....
Either way, this project is very much on it's first feet so any advice or pearls of wisdom greatly appreciated!
An arduino uno or an arduino mega would probably work all the motor hardware fine, however the people tracking is beyond the arduinos capabilities if you mean by video processing
perhaps multiple ultrasound sensors or some other rangefinder may work with it
I have an arduino uno, but with the blob tracking; I was considering writing something in Processing (as they have some pretty good blob tracking libraries) and then using the Processing Arduino library to feed this into the uno...? Would this work?
Also your suggestion of ultrasound is interesting...would that be easy to use to create a continual feed of cooordinates showing where people are in relation to the wires? I've seen this distance detectors before and they seem pretty easy to dupe, and I'm unsure as to whether they'd be able to cope with multiple objects? Also, bearing in mind this is a relatively big installation (taking up ~10 / 15m sq of space, and in an alcove, with several wires at different angles etc), I'm not sure a range finder would work. It'd be quite a spatially 'noisy' space and so pretty difficult to fine tune.
Why do you say the people tracking is beyond arduino's capabilities? Would it not be possible to use the video blob tracking as an input to then process and coordinate the strumming / hammering of the strings as appropriate? Of course, this might need two boards with Xbee shields? Sorry if these are really stupid questions.........!
I've looked at several blob trackers, including OpenCV and flob (which seems to have a few good expansions, but is a bit buggy in places). Any other suggestions / other means of feeding back live coordinates?
AmyBeeee:
Why do you say the people tracking is beyond arduino's capabilities?
Because the Arduino doesn't have the processing speed or memory required to do anything useful to a live video feed. The solution is to do the tracking on a PC or similar and only use the Arduino to control actuation of the wires based on the detection results. Arduino is part of your solution, but isn't doing the blob detection.