My next project for Physical Computing was to make something wearable, so I chose a poncho which, when worn over a Bill Cosby-esque sweater, would turn the colors of the sweater into music. It was composed of three parts: The color sensor, an amplifier and the innards of a delay pedal. The color sensor works quite simply, by flashing a red, green or blue LED at a photoresistor and measuring the resistance. That circuit looked like this:

The code just turned each LED on individually and measured the value coming back into the input pin. It could be calibrated to make one tone for each three LEDs, but it sounded more fun just having each flash generate a tone.

I picked up the delay pedal, a DOD DFX91, off of craigslist. The switch was broken, which was fixed after a little soldering. After running the sound through the delay pedal, though, the volume had been lowered considerably. In my travels for an amplifier, I came across the Little Gem, which worked beautifully (after a few missteps with my amateur soldering abilities).

Finally, I picked up a cheap plastic poncho, and with the help of some duct-tape reinforcement, attached everything together. Here’s a picture of me looking quite silly it. I have started to take it apart again for the next project, but I’ll take a sound clip of it in action and upload that soon.