Barometric skirt: lots of fiddly soldering together
My Baroesque Barometric Skirt reflects environmental data, plus my personal temperature - it's a reflection of the self within the bigger picture. What I mean by this is that how I pass through and interact with the ambient environment interests me. To visualise this passage I have created a skirt that uses sensors to glean environmental data in the form of a barometric sensor board, its data more commonly familiar to those who track and predict weather. To the viewer of the skirt, they will see colours changing in real time on four rays of RGB strip, one for each sensor reading.
This is how I’ve put together the electronics inside the skirt: the aforementioned barometric sensor board protrudes from the skirt and gleans the ambient temperature ( Celcius C) around it, the other sensors on the board collect data and via algorithms in the code work out the altitude (meters m) and pressure (Pascal Pa). I’ve used a Shrimp kit, which is similar to the Arduino Uno, that comes as a bag of components and soldered it onto stripboard. Another temperature sensor, measuring my temperature sits on this stripboard, Four lengths of RGB LED strip radiate from the Shrimp circuit and both the stripboard circuit and the RGB LED strip are sewn onto what I call an ‘apron’, which sits under the skirt and is detachable for washing purposes and also as I like to fashion my electronic circuits as interesting pieces to be viewed in their own right.
The code takes the readings from the sensors and runs an algorithm firstly to convert the data into Celcius, meters or Pascals, and then runs another to mix the colours appearing on each corresponding RGB LED strip. There are 7 colours I’ve set to pass through, the lowest reading being blue, followed by cyan, white, green, yellow, magenta and finally red for the highest reading in each sensor reading data band.
It took a months to create the skirt as there was so many iterations between experimenting with circuits around how to make my idea come to life and creating the skirt, testing paint on fabric, choosing a visual metaphor and style of the skirt, then making the skirt. Next finalising choice of the electronics, coding, prototyping, then transferring the circuit to stripboard. Finally soldering everything together and then debugging, testing, making changes to the code, before eventually putting the skirt and the electronics together.
The Baroesque Skirt’s weather artwork was inspired by the characters Amaterasu & Kabegami from the game Okami.
Read more about the Baroesque Skirt: rainycatz.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/baroesque-barometric-s...
Barometric skirt: lots of fiddly soldering together
My Baroesque Barometric Skirt reflects environmental data, plus my personal temperature - it's a reflection of the self within the bigger picture. What I mean by this is that how I pass through and interact with the ambient environment interests me. To visualise this passage I have created a skirt that uses sensors to glean environmental data in the form of a barometric sensor board, its data more commonly familiar to those who track and predict weather. To the viewer of the skirt, they will see colours changing in real time on four rays of RGB strip, one for each sensor reading.
This is how I’ve put together the electronics inside the skirt: the aforementioned barometric sensor board protrudes from the skirt and gleans the ambient temperature ( Celcius C) around it, the other sensors on the board collect data and via algorithms in the code work out the altitude (meters m) and pressure (Pascal Pa). I’ve used a Shrimp kit, which is similar to the Arduino Uno, that comes as a bag of components and soldered it onto stripboard. Another temperature sensor, measuring my temperature sits on this stripboard, Four lengths of RGB LED strip radiate from the Shrimp circuit and both the stripboard circuit and the RGB LED strip are sewn onto what I call an ‘apron’, which sits under the skirt and is detachable for washing purposes and also as I like to fashion my electronic circuits as interesting pieces to be viewed in their own right.
The code takes the readings from the sensors and runs an algorithm firstly to convert the data into Celcius, meters or Pascals, and then runs another to mix the colours appearing on each corresponding RGB LED strip. There are 7 colours I’ve set to pass through, the lowest reading being blue, followed by cyan, white, green, yellow, magenta and finally red for the highest reading in each sensor reading data band.
It took a months to create the skirt as there was so many iterations between experimenting with circuits around how to make my idea come to life and creating the skirt, testing paint on fabric, choosing a visual metaphor and style of the skirt, then making the skirt. Next finalising choice of the electronics, coding, prototyping, then transferring the circuit to stripboard. Finally soldering everything together and then debugging, testing, making changes to the code, before eventually putting the skirt and the electronics together.
The Baroesque Skirt’s weather artwork was inspired by the characters Amaterasu & Kabegami from the game Okami.
Read more about the Baroesque Skirt: rainycatz.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/baroesque-barometric-s...