Bring on the Dancing Beans
Tue, 29 Sep 2015
I'm working with Leicester-based artist Ashok Mistry at the moment on a project called Methods for Misunderstanding the Nature of Things. This project involves a number of digital elements, including the need to track the movements of a dancer in real-time. These movements will then be sent to a drawing machine where they will be visualised as an ongoing record of the performance. Working out the best technology to use for this has involved considering a number of important requirements.
Firstly, whatever is used it has to be unobtrusive and wearable, so as not to affect the dancer's performance. Then, it probably needs to be wireless, for the same reason. The battery needs to last at least for 30 minutes. It needs to have a motion sensor (of course), and, finally, the data has to be sent to another device (probably a computer) so that it can be turned in to a drawing visualisation.
After experimenting with standard Arduinos and external components I realised that while I could make such a device, it was clearly going to be a bit bigger than I hoped.
Then I discovered the LightBlue Bean. This little Arduino compatible board runs off of a coin battery, communicates over Bluetooth and has an accelerometer built in. It could have been designed for the project!
I've developed a little bit of code that allows Processing to read the data wirelessly from the Bean and am now experimenting with it to make sure that it meets the other requiremes, to do with battery life and robustness. So far it certainly seems to be.
Keep an eye out for more about the project over the next couple of months.
