HapticHat

Haptics on inside of hat
What a mess of wires
Bluetooth connection works with microphone sensor, but ran into trouble with receiving data
With accelerometer unit attached

Inspiration

Spatial hearing is perhaps the most powerful sense we have - our brain takes advantage of the relative intensity of sound to left and right ears to pinpoint the direction from which it came from. We wanted to try to replicate that electronically. The plan was to have three microphone modules localize incoming sound, return an estimate for the general direction, and buzz the The hope is that it can restore spatial hearing without needed to hear anything, like when putting on a pair of headphones.

What it does

Once the arduino setup detects an audio spike, it uses the relative intensity of the noise for all three microphones (three are pointed away from each other) to locate the general direction from which it came from. The information is then encoded to the haptic motors in the rim of a baseball cap, which vibrate to alert the user of the calculated direction.

How we built it

The concept involves attaching 12 haptic vibration motors to the rim of a baseball cap. Three microphones on the outside are connected to an arduino mini. Once these detect a sound spike, it finds the general direction of the sound and relays it via bluetooth to the second arduino. The second arduino is connected to the 12 haptic motors. Once it receives the spatial data via bluetooth it triggers the motors.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the bluetooth modules to work and transmit information between two arduinos was so difficult that we decided to switch to one arduino to simplify workload. (also reduced the number of haptic motors on the cap from 12 to 6). Though the code for spatial localization was good on a flat surface, once we placed the mics on a hat everything started to fall apart, physically (wires detaching). Soldering haptic motor connections to resistors was tedious because we didn't have a soldering iron! We hot glued every connection...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the haptic motors to work with literally no documentation from the manufacturer. We only knew the operating voltage of 3.3V - no graphs or charts, just one number. We measured the resistance of the motor and treated it as an equivalent resistor.