Vapour Beat

Inspiration

A video of smoke being blown over a pair of speakers. Searched online for a similar product, and found none. Since it could not be found on google either, it was assumed that it was not developed yet. Creating a new product no one else in the mainstream media has made yet was enticing

What it does

It generates smoke rings with the beat of the music

How I built it

Ripped apart a set of speakers, designed and built a chamber to generate air vortexes. Chamber design took multiple iterations to do. Experimented with different sized and shaped nozzles attached to the fog machine to cool down and slow down the smoke. Connected a raspberry pi 2 to the speaker system, along with an Ethernet cable which played music after filtering out/adding bass and treble.

Challenges I ran into

The air vortex was lot harder to be generated than previously thought. The majority of the time here was spent doing research and development into getting that part of the system to work. The smoke was also very hard to cool and slow down at the same time, given the materials we brought. Many, many iterations and general research had to be done in order for the system to function. This loss in time made it hard to implement the back-end we had originally intended to include, which included a website that allowed for users to choose the next song to be played.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to get the smoke rings to work. In the end, after all our failures, the core proof of concept of our project pulled through.

What I learned

About smoke rings: Smoke rings are generated best with a 1-5Hz audio signal, and must be a sawtooth wave. Sine and square do not work to generate any smoke rings. The size of the chamber opening, in proportion to the volume displacement factor of the speakers and the size of the chamber matters greatly when it comes to smoke right production. High frequency waves generate a wind-like stream of air, which cannot sustain smoke rings. Hence, the splitting up of song signals had to be done in order to ensure the music AND the rings could be experienced.

What's next for Vapour Beat

Developing a signal processing program on the raspberry pi, which will be able to automatically split up the audio input into different channels, for better sync and formation of smoke rings.

Built With

• mpc
• raspberry-pi-2