Pulse Tester

One step further to reactive wearables, we are for aesthetic, spectacle, and assured annihilation with the utilization of the ESP32 microcontroller and reactive electronic components.

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Inspiration

I've always enjoyed the idea of audio reactive wearables, this project represents a stepping stone in my personal venture to design a seamless wearable that interacts with the audio I play on my phone/laptop. Additionally, I design 3D props for conventions, so I figured this was a good time to combine the 2 ventures for this hackathon.

What it does

Initially, It was to do exactly what was listed on my inspiration page but I ended up pivoting for a stopgap measure instead for the sake of the hackathon. Instead, it reads pressure sensor data from ADC to use as data to power an LED strip which reacts in proportion to the user pressing on the sensor.

How we built it

I designed the prop weapon using a CAD program called Plasticity and programmed the software through ArduinoIDE using Adafruit's Neopixel Library for the LED strip

Challenges we ran into

Initially I planned to use the FFTW, PortAudio, and Aubio libraries to sample and analyze audio output data from my laptop in VSCode, however PortAudio was only able to recognize my inbuilt laptop microphone and none of my other audio output devices. I consulted with the mentors to try and port over my project to Windows on VSCode, but found out that this was a lengthy process just to set up a developer environment for this, which prompted me to reduce the project in scope and test the electronic components I was going to have react to audio data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Making progress on both project iterations where both are in a operational state
  • Further progress in PortAudio programming
  • Analog to Digital conversion of pressure sensor data
  • Combined microelectronics, programming, and 3D modelling/printing into a minimum viable product

What we learned

Aubio showed me within their repository that Audio Onset Detection (beat detection) was the proper term for the effect I intended, and that it was a currently ongoing research topic, since newer algorithms intended to get as close as possible to what people recognize as a distinctive beat in audio.

Mentors helped me pivot away from the first iteration by helping me understand the C++ dev environment on windows

What's next for Pulse Tester

I intend to further my pursuit of onset detection implementations as well as creating additional (possibly parameterized) visual profiles to use in the future.

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