TAP BOX – Carla Molins | Physical Computing

Goal of the project and/or desired interaction

Music box that creates different tones through 8 different capacitive sensors (tags). I wanted to try out a different interface for the instrument that provided a tactile experience too.

Quick description of assembly and list of core components

– 1x Arduino

– 1 x medium breadboard.

-CAP1188-8-Key Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout

– Wires

– 2 x buzzers

How it works

I prepared a set of 8 metallic tags and used them as capacitive sensors that trigger a different sound each. I’m using Adafruit’s library for the CAP1188 to be able to have 8 different wires. In addition, I have pitches.h that includes the different frequencies of sound that I’m playing.

Here, there is a sample of how each capacitor trigger the sound just by calling the proper element in the array.

Any problems you encountered and/or solved

I had problems before using the capacitive breakout because the different sensors were far from reliable when were built just from wires and resistors . I had to adjust the different tones to have variety of sound. Lastly, capacitive are quite sensible, so without and enclosure it was difficult to play, so it just needed a simple box to hold everything together. ( The box right now is just a temporary placeholder because it stills needs more space for the battery).

Images of your circuit