Spacehopper Demo

I’ve been working with my colleagues on a project for SonyEricsson around the release of their latest mobile phones series (Satio and Aino). The project involves using twitter to inflate a warehouse full of spacehoppers on a live webcam. The hoppers will be “released in the wild” as part of the product launch, and tweeters can suggest what their fate should be. The whole system uses an Arduino-controlled solenoid array which takes its input from a Ruby script which is listening to the twitter streaming API. Tweets sent via the API are used to randomly inflate one of the 49 hoppers on the array. The hoppers, username and the tweet message are displayed via a live feed. Sony Ericsson have posted the “making-of” video on YouTube, and I found myself simplifying the technical details, yet again…

Thought it would be good to post the simple PIR (passive infrared) circuit that I used to create the interactive sensors for the installation.

The circuit diagram for the magnetone is pretty straightforward. The cool thing about the ULN2003A is that it has current-limiting resistors built in, so you don’t have to add those as separate components for each of the devices that you’ll be triggering. Any suggestions for improvement are welcomed!

Magnetone schematic