Could social media impact urban planning? It's a question Ruggero Castagnola and Antoni Kaniowski of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) are attempting to answer with a backpack, a megaphone, and Intel's recently-unveiled Galileo microprocessor board. Their creation, Social City Detector, showcased at last week's Rome Maker Faire, picks up on incoming tweets and turns them into audible frequencies. "We decided to create something that merges the physical and the digital layers in cities," says Castagnola. "We wanted to make social media visible."
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Follow their process in the video above, part 3 in our Makers series (watch parts 1 and 2 here and here). Then check out the duo's step-by-by step guide below for creating your own Social City Detector. To get you started, we're also giving away 10 Galileo boards. Click HERE to enter.1) Get a decent sized megaphone and rugged, field-trip looking backpack.2) Mess around with the electronics in the megaphone until you find a place to plug in your signal. Bypass the volume adjuster - you're going for loud!
3) Make a nice box for your electronics and embed it in in the back-pack. Go clear acrylic if you want an all-wires-exposed look. Throw a couple of rotary switches in there for good measure.
4) Create a cloud-based server application that pulls geo-localised social media data and organise it in database with an easy to access custom made API.
5) Outfit a Intel Galileo board with Wi-Fi connection, and write Arduino software that pulls down data from the server, sort it according to parameters set with your two-knob interface and output a geiger-like sonification of the data through bit-banging the Galileo's pins.
6) Make sure it runs on a proper battery pack (with accordingly proper voltage regulator).The audio output is designed to mimic the sound of a Geiger counter, which is a device used to measure radiation. So in effect, the Social City Detector is a "geiger counter for social media radiation."
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7) Take it to the streets!
Interested in what else happened at the Rome Maker Faire? Check out the first two installments of our Maker series below:Lyt
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5) Outfit a Intel Galileo board with Wi-Fi connection, and write Arduino software that pulls down data from the server, sort it according to parameters set with your two-knob interface and output a geiger-like sonification of the data through bit-banging the Galileo's pins.
6) Make sure it runs on a proper battery pack (with accordingly proper voltage regulator).The audio output is designed to mimic the sound of a Geiger counter, which is a device used to measure radiation. So in effect, the Social City Detector is a "geiger counter for social media radiation."
