The building blocks project has been, by far, the most complicated project I have ever tackled. At last, though, the completion of the project is near.

I have purchased these IPod Breakout boards to communicate with the mp3 players from Arduino. This makes the communication between the two pieces of hardware possible, so that when Arduino senses a change in the overall resistance of the box (i.e, when the box is being stacked or unstacked) it will trigger the IPod’s play or pause functions.

Also, I purchased some logic level converters to transform my microprocessor’s 5V to a nice ipod-safe 3.3V.

Here are some pictures to help map out my progress. Sorry for the poor quality photographs : )

First, a look at the components. Here we have the speakers I purchased from Digikey. At first, I thought I would need to make an amplification circuit because I presumed the sound coming out of these wouldn’t be powerful enough. Fortunately, I was proven wrong, and those 3W speakers are quite powerful! On the little board you can also see the ATTINY chip which will take care of the IPod and sensing if the box is being stacked on others or not.
**EDIT** I will be using multiple Arduinos instead of ATTINY chips. The chips do not enable me to install the Arduino communication protocols.

Here is the destroyed iPod (still works!) and hacked headphones. The iPod shuffle won’t be necessary anymore for the project, but the headphones will still be of use! I had to strip the wires, then carefully separate the innings from the protective coating, and weld the 4 resulting wires to electrical wires. These are then welded to the speaker.

And here is one of the boxes! They are made of Russian Plywood, 2 panels (sides) are 5″x5″ with three sides cut at 45 degrees, 2 other panels (top and bottom) are 5″x10″ and also have three sides cut at 45 degrees, and 1 panel (back) is 5″x10″ and all sides are cut at 45 degrees. I used linseed oil to add color, and I made holes with a drill where the wires are going to connect with the copper. I also made 3/8th of an inch grooves in the wood to fit the copper strips.

Here’s the inside with all the wires for the copper in place.

The copper strips were cut with the “guillotine” at the metal shop at Concordia. To weld on the strips, I had to get silver conductive epoxy (hot welding wasn’t holding) and regular epoxy was used to apply the strips to the wood.

After consulting a lot of people, it seems that the general consensus is that the sound should come out of the blocks instead of coming out from external speakers. This adds a huge amount of difficulties. Here are a few:

+ Sound: Now the sound must come out of an MP3 player. Unfortunately, MP3 cards are extremely expensive (around 80$ each). The cheap alternative is to hack low-cost MP3 players. I purchased 5 for around 100$.

+ Hacking: is hard…

+ Connectivity: I have to destroy headphones and make proper connectivity between the ipod, speakers and amp. It isn’t hard but is quite a long process.

+ Speakers: I purchased some speakers from Digikey for a pretty good price (35$ for 5). The difficulty here was to find low-cost speakers with good Wattage for good sound quality. I ended up buying 3W ones which is very good considering most laptop speakers are 0.5 to 1W.

+ Amplification: Ipods don’t make a lot of sound… And if the piece is presented in a public space like a gallery, chances are people won’t be able to hear anything if people are talking all around. A mini amp circuit for each speaker + ipod circuit had to be done.
**EDIT** After doing some testing with the speakers and the box (wood) amplification it seems I won’t be needing the circuit after all.

+ Design: The boxes were already cut and planned out, fitting a speaker in isn’t an easy task. I also need to make sure the LEDs don’t cast a shadow on the speaker.
**EDIT** The speaker fits snuggly flat on the back wall. The cone is facing the wood because I found that the material amplified the sound quite well.

+ Energy: The main problem is that the piece will only have a 3 hour “lifespan”. Afterward, the front will need to be unscrewed and the iPod recharged. This could be tackled in a version 2.0 of the project.

+ Programming: I have to change my entire code…

But overall the effect will be much nicer! And you know, I love a challenge : )

Also, here is a little list of what has been done and issues arising:

+ Sound recordings: 2 soundscapes have been recorded so far, 3 to go!
+ Photographs: 3 photographs were taken, 2 left for this weekend!
+ Metal: Copper was bought and cut at the metal shop. Extremely good connectivity with almost no resistance. Was worth the 50$!
+ Assemblage: I had to purchase some conductive epoxy to solder the wires to the copper… My pretty copper doesn’t like soldering at all!!
+ Wood: Wood was cut, grooves were made, varnishing was done.

Building Blocks from Claudine Lamothe on Vimeo.

Synopsis

Building Blocks is a project that focuses on collective memories, architecture and senses (touching, earring, seeing). Each box represents one architectural site located in Montreal that is or was in the near past in danger of being destroyed or forgotten, and this project serves as a medium to extend awareness about the beauty and ephemeral nature of these sites.

Technicalities

This is simply a prototype to demonstrate the interaction possible with the blocks once completed. For this version, foam board and white glue were used to make the boxes, aluminium tape used to create connectivity, and resistors of 100 Ohms and 1KOhms used in combination with wiring and electrical tape serve as a detecting mechanism. Also, I used thin wrapping paper during the presentation to hide the untidy insides of the boxes.
[ Download Circuit Sketch ]

As for the software side of the project, I used a combination of Max/MSP and Arduino to do the work.
[ Download Max Patch ] **Edited March 28th**
[ Download Arduino Code ]

Issues

The biggest issue I had was related to the prototyping nature of the project. Since foam board isn’t very heavy, connectivity between the boxes was very hard to achieve. Also, the conductivity of aluminium tape is not as good as with copper, for example, and there would be a lot of “noise” present in the voltage calculations. These two issues combined made it very complicated to calculate what was the voltage range for each box.

On another hand, I will also need to find a way to slightly change my Max patch. A problem with my If statements have made it impossible to play 2 samples at the same time, instead, during the presentation, I made a third, separate sample, that was the 2 first sound samples combined. This works, but isn’t the result I want.
**EDIT** This has been corrected, but the idea of using MAX/MSP for the project has been dropped. Please refer to more recent posts about the project for more information.

For some other descriptions of this project, please refer to previous posts

This is the circuit for resistance sensing I initially used. Changed quite a lot with time **Edited March 28th**