by Yiming Li
I did something new with this project that I hadn’t tried before, I will explain below. Overall, it was a very interesting but somewhat challenging project for me. Even though it’s over now, I still feel like there are a lot of things I can do to improve the project.
The idea of “making some singing bottles” was actually quite random, in fact, it was just something that came to me after I finished learning about piezo in workshop2 and staring at the bottles left over from drinking water on the table.
On the same day, I finished the sketch and basically determined the two implementation schemes of this project.
The image on the left is the original idea, I wanted to use some device to act as a detector to detect the height of the liquid inside the bottle, and then make the bottle make different sounds. But in the end, unfortunately, the idea was cancelled because my knowledge at this stage was not enough to support me to complete the setup of this project, and the principle of this device was a little complicated for me.
Then I rushed out a second sketch, which is the prototype of the current project. It is simpler and easier to implement than the first design. With a switch made of tinfoil, a piezo can create a bottle that can make different sounds.
The next step is to debug the code repeatedly to test feasibility. I made some changes in the code that tutor shared so that it could detect the opening and closing of bottle caps and make some of Mario’s music.
Trying to make a switch out of tinfoil wasn’t as easy as I thought. The foil is very thin, very easy to break, and the wire is difficult to be fixed in the foil. However, too thick tin foil will affect the conduction efficiency of the wire, I used a lot of methods, and finally I cut the protective head of the wire, directly exposing the copper wire inside, so that it can be perfectly fixed and hidden under the tin foil, and will not affect the sensitivity of the entire sensor.
Then there are the connecting wires and the Bread Board. After a little trial and error, I was able to confirm that the piezo could produce the sound I wanted it to. I made some simple arrangements for the wires to make the whole project more concise. I decided to use the big bottle as a demo, and then I started making some small bottles to use as a “chorus” to create harmonies around the big bottles.
In the process of making them, I made some changes to the original idea, I decided to use the small bottles for video recording and the large bottles for demo. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most important one is that I don’t think the piezo sounds very good, and actually doesn’t produce the kind of harmony that I thought it would at first. Also in the process of doing this, I accidentally lost all my code for Mario’s music, which resulted in me having to rewrite them, and although it wasn’t a big deal, I felt a bit frustrated.
Finally, an overall picture of the bottle choir is placed, with the large bottle as the lead singer and the small bottles as the harmonies. Luckily, they made the sound I wanted them to make in the video.
All in all, I am quite satisfied with the final presentation of this project. I’m not going to call it an “instrument”, although it can play Mario’s theme song. I think I can make a lot of changes to it, such as increasing the number of bottles, so that it really has a “bottle choir” scale. But overall, I enjoyed the process of working on this project and the thinking that came from constantly overcoming difficulties.