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Using light sensor to trigger recording?


mmiles54
Nov 15 2009 | 3:12 pm

Hi

I’m working on a project for my 3rd year at University and have finally got my idea. You might have seen this post I made a few weeks ago…

http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=41852&start=0&rid=0&S=44ad4fa83a444d083d62f22fd6c0ef6d

Anyway, I want to use a Japanese Teaset as an interface and make a patch that enables me to lift the lids off of four small cups and speak into them, they then record to a buffer in max and I close the lid etc etc. I was thinking that using something that can trigger the start stop recording based on light levels coming into the cup would be the best way to do this?

What kind of piece of kit am I looking for do you guys think?

Here’s a Blog I’ve started to help me track my thought process, create an online presence and so forth…

http://milesmcp.blogspot.com/

Cheers


Luke Hall
Nov 16 2009 | 3:31 pm

You will probably need some sort of sensor interface like the arduino or make controller kit or teabox (expensive but the name fits!). Then you will then need light dependant resistors which you can wire up to your sensor, if you need help with this the sensor-specific forums are your best bet, the arduino one is really helpful. To get the information into max you’ll want to have a look the [serial] object. I’ve done something similar with a webcam before and converted all the matrix values to 1/0 and then summed the white pixels. This gave a pretty good light sensitive test if you want to tinker with things in max before you get your sensors up and running. Good luck!

lh


martinrobinson
Nov 17 2009 | 12:40 am

If you only need four variable controls you can hack four light sensors onto the four axes of a cheap USB game controller (the two analogue controls each with up/down axes).

Then use the ‘hi’ object to get the data in.

This is not guessing, I have tried it and it works (with cheap light sensors from Maplins).

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