In June of 2014, [Afrdt] spent two weeks on a boat as an artist-in-residence in Linz, Austria. During that time, she created a dress that detects EMF waves and outputs them to vibration motors and a headphone jack.
[Afrdt] started by making two EMF coil antennas and sewed them to cuffs that snap together. She crafted fashionable fabric stripes that both conceal and carry the cables from the coils to an Adafruit FLORA that’s sewn into the body of the dress. The wearer experiences haptic feedback via vibration motors in the chest, and sonic feedback from a mini female headphone jack built into the collar. The zipper functions as a low-pass filter and volume control for the jack. One side bears resistive tape and runs to the FLORA, which is programmed to play an 800Hz tone. The other side runs to the headphone jack via conductive thread. As the zipper is opened, the pitch increases to toward the maximum pitch of 880Hz.
She drew inspiration for this project from [Aaron Alai]’s EMF detector project and built the code on top of it. Broader documentation and many more pictures are available both at [Afrdt]’s site and the residency program’s site.
This project is an official entry to The Hackaday Prize that sadly didn’t make the quarterfinal selection. It’s still a great project, and worthy of a Hackaday post on its own.
There have been several hacks like this, I think HAD needs a new category, “Sensory Augmentation Hacks” for people for whom 5 isn’t enough.
We’ve got at least 9, a few more couldn’t hurt. Well, as long as you’ve properly isolated your circuit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
Well, I suppose I have at least 10. I’ve broken a bone in the past, which still acts as a barometric pressure sensor. Less fun than this hack, but possibly more useful.
Those “sleeves”, Gak!
I like the idea of a foil lined hat with a emf sensor on top. Then you would not only be protected, but know when “they” are trying to probe your mind!
If you put sensor coils in the soles of your shoes, you could become a walking metal detector. Then walk along the beach looking for gold, beer cans, and lost car keys.
You would need shoes like tennis rackets. The coil size of a metal detector largely determines how deep it will “see”, so unless you just want to be picking up the tinfoil from RandyKC’s hat when it blows down the beach, yer gonna need *big* feet.
The only EMF she can pick up is electric motors, florescent and mercury lamps, arc welders, power transformers, and possibly atmospheric electrical activity (i.e. lightning). It only has a bandwidth of 20-850 Hz.
Now if she could make it a near-field receiver that worked up into or near the GHz range now that would be something. Something like a sweeping bug-detector. Radio Shack made a police scanner that could kinda’ sorta’ do that – Pro-83 (http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Pro-83)
Anyone else reminded of sensor netting from ST:TOS episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” Sure, this finds EMF, but to direct the blind with these in a fixed setting should be easy.