Hardware Hacking Workshop - with Yann Seznec

Last Friday I attended the hardware hack workshop with Yann Seznec. The workshop was focussed around using micro controllers to control electronic components such as LED's, and also to get these controllers talking to a computer!


Firstly we covered some basic electronics and learned how to create simple circuits on a breadboard. Pictured below is a very basic circuit used to power an LED. There is a 9V battery connected which is out of the picture. The red wire from this battery supplies the power, the black wire supplies ground. If you zoom in on the picture you can see that the resistor has one leg plugged into the 'power row', the other leg is plugged into the same column as one of the LED legs. So the power runs through the resistor and into the LED (thus the resistor reduces the current to a more manageable amount for the LED). The other leg of the LED is connected to ground to complete the circuit. Hardly rocket science, i'm sure you'd agree!

A simple breadboard circuit

After this we looked at the 40106 chip, which is a micro controller similar to the arduino. We learned to turn two of the pins into an oscillator and by plugging the output into an amplifier we had a very fierce sound whose pitch we could alter using a potentiometer. I doubt we will use this chip in our project so I won't write any more on it just now, but for further reading go here: http://fluxmonkey.com/electronoize/40106Oscillator.htm It explains things far better than I could!

Circuit using the 40106 chip to power an LED

Then we got into the real exciting stuff: the arduino! This micro controller can be a powerful tool which we aim to use in this project. To summarise it briefly, by plugging it into a USB port on a computer you can send both digital and analogue signals to and from the computer and any other voltage-supplying item (a toy, instrument, display ). In a simple example we used a short piece of code to power an LED on and off repeatedly, causing a blinking effect. You must first download software to use with your machine: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

An Arduino Board

The arduino can also be used with Max/MSP which opens up many exciting avenues. Again there is a necessary download found here: http://www.maxuino.org/?page_id=12 So we could use Max patches to 'control' our hacked instrument and vice versa. This is an idea I really like. As there is only 3 of us it would be useful to be able to 'play' our hacks without even having to touch them, as we have written a program to do it for us! An example of this idea can be seen in the video below (which may or may not be using Max/MSP). We can also use information from the hacked toys to control parameters in our Max patches. For example, we could take live samples of our instruments during the first half of the performance, and 'call' these samples to be played in the second half using a specially hacked toy/instrument. Very exciting idea, which we will elaborate on in the near future.

Arduino board triggering electronic toys

It was a really interesting workshop which has inspired many ideas. I've only scratched the surface with a few here, but when we put our heads together I'm sure we will conjure up loads more!

Jordan