Temperature Seeded Audio Project, Day One

Today is a good day for my Temperature Seeded Audio Project. The main reason for this: I discovered the power of using the Arduino platform along side the Processing platform. My concept demonstrating prototype took only one afternoon to build using this combo. I thought the construction/coding would take a week! Using the Arduino and Processing together allowed me step back and see the design aspects of the project without getting bogged down with gritty code details. Pretty stoked on the progress.

More about the overall project in my next post, but briefly, I've been interested in using real time data about the environment to make music for a while. My intention was further propelled by this interview with Brian Eno: Eno Interview

My preliminary idea is to create a temperature sensor that samples current ambient temperature every second. This data is then simultaneously saved to an SD-Card in log file format, and served to my wireless network available to any device or code that points to it's URL.

First the Hardware: For the microprocessor I chose an Arduino Mega with attached Ethernet Shield. For the sensor I chose a simple thermistor based voltage divider circuit connected to an analog input of the Arduino.

Then the firmware: Here is the Arduino Sketch code.

And finally the software: Here is the Processing Sketch code.

Here is a screen shot of both sketches running simultaneously. You can't hear the piano, but it plays a different note every time the temperature changes.