FINAL PROJECT_January 29

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(Attempt Number 1. There will be more, for sure…)

Possible Names:
The Touch of Wavesound
The Sound of Sailing
Bluebeats
Smart Sailor

Short Project Description:
Maritime platform for data collection, visual projection and music generation.

Context:
Since I have been little I have seen from the beach lots of sail boats that navigate fast and nicely in front of me. I always thought that sailing boats could be useful for other things than just entertain the people who are inside. For example they could be useful and suitable to watch a movie during the nights or even they could make music out of their movement. Music producers would appreciate this kind of data like sound effects or postion in orden to create new ways of advanced music.

Boats are fulfilled with lots of technical equipment and software. From GPS devices to all kind of tools and measurements for navigation. Those are expensive equipments and most of the time population doesn’t know about the type of boat or the people who are navigating with them. I don’t consider this relationship extremely important for society but I think that generally speaking, the interaction human-sailing boat from the onshore perspective, from the people who stand on the beach and don’t navigate, is practically inexistent. Usually we see boats like beautiful elements that in fact are just like an empty package of knowledge that cross in front of us. But we don’t interact with them.

- What if boats would have a more existing role from those who stay in land?
- What if other people that are not navigating in the boats could enjoy with the boating of other people? Not only seeing, but interacting.
- What if some of the parts of the boats could be used to create cultural events like projecting a movie?
- Could be possible for musicians to use the data of images and sounds that the boats are transmitting onshore in order to produce music?
- How could you manipulate that sound? What would be feasible to manipulate the “sound of sea”? An analog synthtatizer maybe? Or something more intuitive and relaxed like a piece of robe?
- What if we consider navigation or boats by themselves like another existing part of the famous “Smart City”? A plug and play element of an smart grid. Isn’t a harbor another ecosystem of the city?

Nowadays the role of navigation and boats is just being mostly the role of a unidirectional discipline: Recreation sail boating. Which is a common choice for many boaters. People who have to stay in land cannot enjoy or cannot communicate easily with the boats offshore. Different technological barriers are stablish in this discipline and usually there is a lack of oen source systems in theelectronics marines.

My Project is a about building an open platform system, hardware, software and networks in order that boats and people in land can interact in different ways. Specifically I want them to interact in a more fun and creative way: with music and images/videos projections.

Goals:
• Providing interaction between sailing boats and human beings in land.
• Creating a data acquisition and analysis in order to know different parameters from the boat and from other variables related to temperature, humidity, quality of the sea, etc.
• Creating generative music in land due to the constant movement of the boat in the sea.
• Performing sound into a music production ecosystem by a musician.
• Recording and sending to land the images, videos and sound of the people who are inside the boat.
• Projecting images or videos in the sail of the boat. Those can be sent by the people who are in land, which it will give bidirectional flow to the project.

Design considerations:
The hardware that has to be designed inside the boat needs to be portable and should be allocated in the best way and position in order to send and receive several kinds of information.

Technical considerations:
The enclosure of the hardware should be as waterproof as possible. It will be provided by input and output devices. The enclosure of the device should include a microcontroller. The interactivity between the boats and the people in land will rely by internet connectivity via some specific protocols.

Electronic components, possible software and materials:
1. Enclosure: Laser-cut polypropylene shell.
2. Camera with microphone embedded in the enclosure: waterproof cmos sensor with wide-angle lens and tilt function.
3. Picoprojector embedded in the enclosure.
4. Micro-controller board.
5. Battery terminals. Rechargeable lithium batteries.
6. Sensing: Accelerometer; Temperature; Humidity; Quality of water.
7. Networking protocol: Zig Bee, GPRS, etc.
8. Data to Cloud: Gateway router specially designed to connect sensor networks to the internet via Ethernet, Wi-Fi and 3G interfaces.
9. IOT middleware solutions.
10. Visual programming language developed for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. e.g Pure Data.
11. A software music sequencer and digital audio workstation. e.g. Ableton Live.
12. Setting up a MIDI connection between Ableton Live and Pure Data. e.g. a piece of robe: T-shirt, a bag, etc.
13. Synth Robe: the piece of robe could be played and controlled by the music sequencer with another microcontroller.
14. Speakers.

Features:
• Web Platform: computer visualization in real time of the position of the sail boats offshore and their variables while they are navigating (humidity, pressure, water quality, etc).
• Video/images projection on the sail of the boat. Images and videos will be sent from the sail to onshore and from onshore to the sail. Bidirectional flow.
• That means we could project a movie or a light show from the onshore space to the boat.
• The space onshore could be for example the Sitges Beach Lab which is literally based in front of the beach. From there we could project the videos of the people sailing on the wall in real time.
• Open source: everyone could have acces to visualize the videos/images from their friends and relatives who are sailing.
• Creation of a t-shirt, bag or a piece of robe with a responsive sound system integrated that reproduces music out of the sail data.