BitBeats

Inspiration

To utilize the everyday habit of finger drumming in lesser attentive individuals to create actual music. Additional inspiration came from the necessity to provide direct and tactile feedback to music aficionados or amateurs in order to help them enjoy and learn music.

What it does

BitBeats is a interactive and direct feedback device that takes input from custom touch sensors and uses that (and pygame on raspberry pi) to match music pad sounds to your fingers. These sounds can be changed on user input to whatever is mapped in the pi library. When connected to another glove a user can control 10 different sounds for any mapped instrument.

How we built it

We made homemade touch and pressure sensors with conductive and dielectric fabrics embedded into glove fingertips. These sensors were then hard and "soft" wired to a Raspberry Pi board which controlled our musical samples. All of it was coded in Python and interfaced with pygames to get each individual sound mapped to a specific touch input.

Challenges we ran into

We had to make several custom headers to interface the gloves with Raspberry Pi and also had to make custom touch sensors from available fabric. Making this all work well with the glove design required careful planning and sewing skills (which we lacked before teaming up with a Kent State fashion student).