laser listening bunny sculpture

My bunny has big ears, and she is such a good listener!  

I made this sculpture with items I found at the shore.  There are broken dishes in green, blue and white; broken glass in green and brown; there are also shells, rocks, wood, seed pods and a feather.  Of course, I could not stop at hot glue, grout and acrylic paint!  I just had to add lasers!!!!!  

The substrate is a wooden fruit crate, which has cute round holes that were perfect for a light sensor and a speaker.  I essentially made a laser communicator hidden in a bunny sculpture, which I used to wirelessly transmit music 100 feet away!  I had to do it at night, because I kept losing track of the laser.  In the end I taped the laser transmitter to the roof of my car and moved the receiver bunny into the laser stream on my neighbor's porch.  Check out the video link below the pictures to see how I did it.  

Did you know that NASA can stream video to the moon and back using lasers and satellites? 

You can make a similar "Data Communicator" with infrared (IR) led's.  

Frozen Musical Snow Globe

  Do you wanna build a snow globe? In summer?  Us, too!  We spent a few days making the polymer clay Olaf and finding a fishbowl and sheet music.  The electronics assembly was super fast.





Here is Jack helping me with the finishing touches:

For the complete how to, visit my Instructable "Musical Snow Globe"

Arduino Jukebox - Ice Cream Theme

This is a video of me doing a teardown of my Ice Cream Jukebox, which was a project originally posted by Dave over at littleBits.  I don't have access to a laser cutter, so I used these items from my recycling bin: ice cream box, a VHS tape for the "card reader", cereal box, tape, and a speaker from broken headphones that my mom had asked me to fix.  For the different transparencies, I used a milk jug, foil lined tea bag envelope, a cut up and taped down VHS tape, and maybe I'll use a juice pouch for another transparency.

Since I used an ice cream box as the container, I thought it would be fun to use ice cream themed songs.  The songs are "It's A Small World", "The Entertainer", "Mr. Softee", and "You Are My Sunshine".  The code uses the pitches.h arduino library.