The project started out with me wanting to recreate a tiny terrarium of Waterfall from Undertale, that would include lots of pretty glowing elements. It evolved from that when I watched the HackSmith’s Make it Real series, and decided I wanted a more interactive thing to have and use - a thing I had made real from the game.
Waterfall is still one of my favourite sections of the underground, and with what we learned in the course I thought it would be fairly simple to make an echo flower. This flower is a plant native to the area that repeats the last thing it hears. At first I debated and researched on taking actual plants, making them glow in the dark, and connecting them to the Arduino; but decided against it. I wanted to make something that would look like an echo flower - and no plants really do. So I decided instead to use the blue fabric I had been saving for years, and jewelry wires, and make it myself.
So with this concept in mind, I came up with my plan. I would use the 8-bit speaker and “big sound” sensor from our elegoo kit. The Microphone would be triggered when a person covered one of the two photocells, listening and recording the last 5 seconds, and then the other photocell would trigger the playback. This was quickly abandoned however, as I ran into problems with the micro SD adaptor, and couldn’t find consistent instruction on using the big sound to record. (Thankfully, the micro sd problem was solved. I was using the wrong windows language to call the sound files)
I was also planning on using the other speaker parts I had (one from the kit and one from when I built my desktop), the LCD screen, and LEDs to create a more complete environment. I would use the bug-eye sensor from the elegoo to trigger (LEDs pulsing, sound effects playing, and LCD screen showing the text from the dialogue box that introduces the echo flower to the player), but decided to only keep the lcd in the interest of time. It’s a good thing I did, as the testing and assembly of the glow-in-the-dark flowers took way longer than I thought.
Gorilla Residency 2021 and the future
As the project itself was originally fairly simple I had plans to develop it even further, and during the 2021 Gorilla Residency I tried to do so.
The premise of the echo flower was for it to listen and then playback, as it does in the video game "Undertale". I didn't have the skills at the time during tangible, so I wanted to use the residency as a time to focus on doing that, but also more.
I wanted to combine the echo flower with a vocal exercise - so the flower would listen, and then match pitch to what it heard before modulating to a note relative. I was trying to use plants I was propagating as a touch sensor to determine either how many hertz or semitones the pitch would fluctuate but wasn't able to fully develop this within the time.
I do hope to revisit it sometime in the future though!
