The Musical Chair

About the project

A musical chair to play the game of musical chairs with random household sounds. Made using a Circuit Playground, Processing and Pure Data.

Project info

Items used in this project

Hardware components

Circuit Playground Express Circuit Playground Express x 1

Software apps and online services

Pure Data Pure Data
Arduino IDE Arduino IDE
The Processing Foundation Processing The Processing Foundation Processing

Hand tools and fabrication machines

3D Printer (generic) 3D Printer (generic) x 1

Story

A musical chair to play the game of musical chairs, with random household sounds. Made using Adafruit's Circuit Playground, Processing, Pure Data and a 3D printed chair.

Full project video

Record sounds

To use random household sounds, you need to record some. Grab a recording device, like a camera or your phone, and record some weird sounds.

Chair

The next step is making a chair. I chose to 3D print this one I found on Thingiverse, which I edited to make space for the Circuit Playground.

3D Printed chair

Write some code

The Circuit Playground has all sorts of cool sensors, and the idea is to get the data from these sensors to Pure Data, which will make the sounds.

The straightforward way to do this, is to send the data from the Circuit Playground straight to Pure Data via serial communication. After many, many failed attempts and no proper tutorials on how to accomplish this, it was time for plan Z.

In this elaborate plan Z, the data is sent from the Circuit Playground to Processing via serial communication. Processing then sends this forward via OSC to Pure Data.

It's a bit of a loop, certainly a hassle, but the only way I managed to get it working. Tips on how to get the serial data to Pure Data would be highly appreciated.

The code for all of these parts can be found in the attachments below.

Put it all together

It's time to assemble all the parts! Upload the code to the Circuit Playground, attach it to your computer and run the Processing and Pure Data scripts at the same time. As if by magic, this should work!

Challenge people to an epic game of musical chairs

You'll be the life of any party with this awesome chair!

Code

Processing

Code for the Processing part

Pure Data

The Pure Data part

Circuit Playground

Code for the Circuit Playground

Credits

Photo of 8BitsAndAByte

8BitsAndAByte

We’re Dane & Nicole, two makers that create tremendously terrible tech, which we happily share with you on our channel! https://www.youtube.com/c/8bitsandabyte

   

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