By translating microcurrent fluctuations occurring across the surface of a plant’s leaf, this device generates MIDI notes allowing a user to listen into the invisible biological processes occurring within a plant. Originally built as the MIDI Sprout, then later as a biodata wifi daughter board for the Adafruit Circuit Playground, this is the continued evolution of my educational biodata sonification project. By using the Adafruit Feather ecosystem, biodata can be translated into serial MIDI, Bluetooth MIDI, WiFi MIDI, or even directly into musical sounds!
Based on a simple 555 timer circuit set as astable multivibrator, tiny changes in electrical conductivity are measured and turned into variable width pulses which are read by the microcontroller and changes are detected in code turning on LEDs and producing MIDI notes and control changes.
Listen in on the secret life of plants, and understand how your tools work!
HEGduino
By Joshua Brewster:
A revolutionary new biofeedback method – now open sourced for the ESP32!
HEG stands for Hemoencephalography – the measure of blood flow in the brain. This is intricately involved in brain activity and consciousness – and it turns out you have direct control!
Until now it’s never been affordable or accessible to experience this unique yet simple tool. Light penetrates through our skull easily so we can use pulse oximetry to measure the surface blood flow information in your brain! It turns out stress and poor health have huge impacts on our brain’s blood flow activity and can straight up shut parts of itself down in response. Our frontal cortex also increases blood flow activity when we are focused. The HEG allows us to make basic measures of this and more! We are building a full web based suite to go with it – for free!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
