sound boxen

this is an expansive series of projects all spring from the same code base. what all have in common is the idea of a self-contained sound-producing box that can also communicate via Flock or Peep protocols (See sr-ix.com, Code). some have battery and solar power and power management for use in remote, unattended installations. at the moment none have sensors but environmentally-triggered flocking behavior is the goal. the solar devices will also get an LED and some sensor.

code for each project is below, which also require the SR libraries to compile.

all of these talk to the/a flockBase device, usually attached to a desktop Processing application that logs and visually displays flock status. flockBase can also turn all birds on or off.

A bad batch of counterfit chips caused me to make flockPinger, a nRF24L01+ module test machine which doubles as a radio as well; shown below.

Dry Run (city of Santa Clarita)

Modeled after Stroll, a previous public artwork for the City of Santa Clarita, produced by the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2012, Dry Run is a "poetic sound installation" that responds to and explores the implications of the word, Drought. -- excerpt from the ViralNet Dry Run page.

i made this stuff during a low point in my documenting my work for some reason now unknown to me. i'll try to add it incrementally. asking about it speeds the process.

these have LiPo battery, solar panel, solar charge controller. they are intended for unattanded operation, affixed to a light pole or equiv, [not commandable from the ground], and play during daylight/dusk hours only. "dusk" is detected by solar panel output, rather than a clock.

meow wolf boxen

I made these for Meow Wolf, but that deal fell through, so they've lived in my house for a few years now.

these are 9VDC wall-wart powered, no battery or solar. LED and pushbutton. code is on github. They're ugly because they are not meant to be seen. these were the original impetus for this project, which i proposed based upon a previous workup of the radio protocols. these became the platform for Flock and Peep protocols (the latter aimed very specfically at super-low-power requirements of solar power).

there were two prototypes; the first one has the red proto shield and the chopped up box. it later got cannibalized for the soundcard. the second prototype became Brett and Heather's wedding gift (it probably needs code update!). some of the in-construction pics show radios with rubber-ducky antennae attached; that was the goal, but the whole batch turned out to be fake chips (i mean wtf, seriously) and so i replaced them all with integral-antenna modules, which are just fine anyway.

all sound boxen

all soundboxen have a status LED that indicates global state. the blink sequence is two seconds long, and the number of blinks in that time have the following meanings:

all sound boxen support the following commands (though not all do anything useful, eg. solar commands for the non-solar birds), delivered via USB (the serial monitor) or radio or stored in EEPROM.

all sound boxen also support the following commands, sent via USB (eg. manually typed) or saved in EEPROM only. actually some of these may be changed via radio message but you ought to have prior clue before attempting.