Blinky

photo-of-blinky
Blinky was my first attempt at creating a freeform electronics sculpture.

Form

I designed Blinky to be minimal. The sculpture is split into 2 main sections, the ‘head’ and ‘body’, joined by a small wire neck.

Another wire runs from the base and into the Arduino microcontroller to provide power.

Function

Blinky has 2 states - sleeping, and awake. An MPU6050 module detects changes in force on the sculpture, and when it detects a bump, Blinky will ‘wake up’. It will ‘fall asleep’ again if it’s ignored for a bit. A moving mean average filters the output from the MPG 6050. A 75 sample mean determines a rolling average, and then the program takes 2 samples from this.

When he’s awake, Blinky cycles through different expressions. These include blinking, looking around, or whirling his mouth. When he falls asleep, Blinky chooses between a static sleeping expression and a snoring animation.

There is a micro-USB port powering this sculpture, at the back of the wooden base. The full source code for this project is available here - blinky source code.

Parts

Key components of the sculpture are -

  • Arduino Pro Mini + FTDI USB Programmer.
  • 7 segment display.
  • MPU6050 Gyroscope and Accelerometer.
  • Wooden base (a recycled candle lid).
  • Enameled copper wire (bad idea. avoid enamel).