Tag Archives: day5

somersethouse, v1

Day 5: Video documentation

Amidst the wires and brains and things, we ended up making two main things yesterday. First, a way for the Museum in a Box to recognise the objects in it, in a very simple form. We stuck RFID stickers on each object, and attached a .WAV file to each tag, and then wrote a little magic dust to play the .WAV for each object. (You can hear the dulcet tones of volunteer helper and archivist to the stars, Geoff Browell, describing Hathor and the Colossal Foot.) You can see what it was like here:

Secondly, we took the Rosetta Stone as our object of focus, and worked on making it a physical trigger to hear the text on the actual stone in three slightly more modern languages: English, Greek and Arabic. Voila:

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museuminabox, somersethouse, v1

Day 5: Box with a brain

Today we’re giving the box a brain.

Can the box know what’s in it? Can it know when you pick something up? Can it tell you what it is?

Adrian has brought his magic box of tricks, and his own (amazing) brain.

Arduino kit

Adrian’s Arduino kit

We are using RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tags to identify the different objects.

The RFID stickers were a bit big for most of the objects, so we stuck them on plinths so we could attach the tags.

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Then Adrian did some magic…the RFID reader senses the tag, the Arduino reads the tag and sends it to the Raspberry Pi (some readers can speak directly to Pis, but we didn’t have one like that).

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And now when you put the Rosetta Stone on the reader you can hear what it is and a translation of the text.

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Now we’re going to record the names and label text for all the objects.

And we’re (well, Adrian is) going to set up an infra-red distance sensor to allow us to play different translations of the Rosetta Stone (a different language plays depending on the distance).

The options are endless…

Could people add something to the object and send it on to someone else?

Can we put different boxes in close proximity and they talk to each other?

Can the box collect stories? or responses to stories? or answer questions?

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