I'm at the start of a very exciting project and thought it would be good to record what happens on the journey.My fabulous wife Michelle has worked with children for a long time - she runs Bluey and Baloo, a children's entertainment, event créche and nanny service, among many other things. She's more recently started the Octopus Project with our friend Cosi - a series of educational outdoor activities for children, and they organised a brilliant event last year - the End of Summer Festival in Wallasey.
We've got hold of a 1982 Fleetwood Colchester that's in surprisingly good nick for its age, but is rather dated and, of course, is completely unadapted in any way for what we want to use it for. We're thinking about how to decorate it, adapt the furniture layout so it can perform its function for as many children's needs as possible, and which surfaces, textures, sights and sounds should be available. I had a look around at some of the sensory AV kit you can get, and it is phenomenally expensive, and certainly beyond the reach of our project unless we had a serious injection of cash. And besides, I like to tinker, and haven't had a good excuse to tinker with electronics and programming (in a non-work way) for a very long time!
So, along with all the other stuff we need to do, I'm looking to design an Audio-Visual setup for a sensory space, with a limited power supply - it would be good to run as much off the 12V system as possible so it can be run when we're not near the mains for a good few hours.
It would be really great to have some interactive lighting, and one idea I've had would be some colour lighting control. I've always wanted to do something with the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi, and now I've got something I can do with it, and what looks like a very good guide to get things started:
http://popoklopsi.github.io/RaspberryPi-LedStrip/#!/ , which should be able to produce something along these lines:
This could be massively expanded from what's going on on that page - mostly the electronics - and indeed this video, to something a bit more responsive. I'm thinking of a Button board, or a tablet app for the child to use as a first step, before hooking up a microphone, or monitoring playing sound, and providing lighting based on the characteristics (tone and spread of tome, for instance). I've ordered a 5m strip of the LEDs, and the MOSFETS etc. to drive them, and I think that mounting them inside the curtain pelmet which runs 3 sides of the larger area, and having them reflect out into the space. This way, they're completely hidden when the space needs to be calm but hopefully a riot of colour when that's what's wanted!
I've got the stuff for this on order, so will post an update when it's tinkering time!
The second area I'm looking at is interactive video. This was something that looked particularly expensive to achieve - one system costing over £8000! My thinking there is to use a Kinect controller, again hooked up to the Pi, which could have objects track a child, or circle them, or maybe play sounds when they go into them. I'd also love to have something like a Julia set generator which changes the set parameters based on the XY position of the child on the floor!
All this would be a significant programming challenge for me I've not done anything graphics wise since I did PHIGS at University, and have never done anything that talks to hardware - but I'm always willing to learn! I'm thinking of using a couple of LED projectors to display images on the floor and ceiling - some of these are quite low power but still kick out at a half decent brightness, and some even come with their own battery packs so running on 12 volts shouldn't be a problem.
Plenty more posts to come on all of this as the project takes shape, stuff gets delivered and tinkered with, and milestones are reached... of course I'd welcome any ideas, links to existing projects etc. in the comments!
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