I love the sound of wind chimes, don't you?
Maybe you don't, but certainly you can appreciate the idea of digital wind chimes. Oh yes, digital.
How do they work, you ask? Simple. They're just like normal wind chimes, only they can sound like whatever you want. Or whatever you don't want, if you're into that.
The idea came to me suddenly on a windy evening. All theatrics aside, I was lying in bed trying to visualize a final project, and heard my wind chimes clanging in the wind outside. It was then I knew that I had to make nerdy wind chimes. I already had an Arduino board capable of making sound and enough old computer parts lying around the house to appropriate six PCI-slot covers. These would be my chimes.
Wind chimes are something I've always enjoyed, and during the conception of the project, I asked myself what elements made wind chimes pleasant. I was curious - can wind chimes be digitized and still retain their soothing quality? In order to hack the "wind-chime aesthetic" I would need a rugged, highly technical construction. The chimes would also need to make a noise that is unpleasant, or at least manufactured in nature. This allows me to examine the core mechanic of wind chimes and decide what is really important to me about the device to begin with.
The construction is simple - each PCI-slot cover was affixed with a sheet of aluminum and connected to an input pin on the Arduino and to the +5 volt rail through a 10k resistor. To the layman, the chimes are digital triggers. When the electrically grounded aluminum foil on the speaker hanging in the middle of the chimes strikes the aluminum foil on a chime, current flows and the digital pin on the arduino switches state. The Arduino then says, "Hey! Stuff's happenin!" and plays a sound. In this case, I chose the sound of arcade beeps to be my constant breezy companion.
I screwed all of this as best I could onto an old compact disc, topping it all off with a hand-soldered circuitboard and a mounting bracket for the Arduino that amounted to be a royal pain in the ass. A few rubber bands and some hot glue later, and the wind chimes were well on their way.
An old hard drive casing contributed the wind catcher portion. This was attached using some ribbon cable, electrical tape, and hot glue. Finally, I used some stretchy cord to suspend the whole apparatus.
The chimes were a great success. They replay their 8-bit sample faithfully at different sampling rates to give it lower and higher pitches - but only when the wind blows. It's like having a tiny R2D2 around to keep me company, and he always knows when it's windy.
