For her science fair project, [David]’s daughter had thoughts about dipping eggs in coffee, or showing how dangerous soda is to the unsuspecting tooth. Boring. Instead she employed her father to help her build a Morse Code waterfall.
[David] worked with his daughter to give her the lego bricks of knowledge needed, but she did the coding, building, and, apparently, wire-wrapping herself. Impressive!
She did the trick with two Arduinos. One controls a relay that dumps a stream of water. The other watches with an optical interrupt made from an infrared emitter and detector pair to get the message.
To send a message, type it in the keyboard. The waterfall will drop spurts of water, and then show the message on the decoder display. Pretty cool. We also liked the pulse length dial. The solution behind the LEDs is pretty clever. Video after the break.
I wish my text would do all of that stupid stuff so I can get buzzed while I type. Addiction to Distraction causing stuff for sure.
Stream not drip. Short and long just like International Morse, drips imply the old click spaced American Morse.
“HI” !!??
Kids these days! Whatever happened to ‘Hellow world”?
Seriously, though, nicely done project.
Modern kids can’t spell “hello”, so they had to shorten it.
…much like the unintelligent “sup” you get from them from time to time.
Ah yes, clearly suggesting inferior mental development. There is no possibility it developed in complex social cliques to self identify and dissociate from others (Geezers) while quickly gaining popularity and integration into a wider vernacular, no never.
//Shove off with your ‘unintelligence’.
Geez, I didn’t expect to have to explain this… I wasn’t really criticizing at kids’ speech (language evolves), but rather at Queeg’s comment where he misspelled “hello” while poking fun at kids for shortening the word–my joke being that perhaps there was a good reason for doing so.
Hello world examples are stupid. HEY GUYS, I JUST MADE MY COMPUTER TALK AS IF IT WAS ALIVE! I don’t know why this trend is alive when a simple ‘test’ or ‘asdf’ is all that is needed. oh, BUT IT’S NOT TRENDY!!!
Hello world is not about trendy, it is about tradition.
My little silicon minions’ first words are always “Kill all humans”.
Also the water morse was a cool project! Morse encoded matter transmitted messaging, picked up by observing the mediums interaction with invisible light. Cool indeed!
Actually, “HI” (…. ..) is a fairly common greeting when doing anything relating to CW/Morse because it is easy to remember/implement in hardware. The ur-example is probably OSCAR 1: http://www.amsat.org/amsat/features/sounds/oscar1-filt.wav
I suppose you could also go with WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT
Awesome project, if they had time to do a laminar flow nozzle they could have sent the message across the room in a large arc.
I like your thinking. Time to hack public water displays with laminar flow jets to do morse code.
“Help me, I’m trapped in this pipe” or “What kind of person decodes water displays?” etc.
Like an easter egg for real life.
Looks like a very sophisticated Chinese water torture machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture
You could code propaganda into the drips and brainwash (so to speak) your victim, assuming they could understand Morse (or, figure it out after a few months of this process).
In case you were(n’t) wondering where I come up with this stuff, I had a vasectomy so all my fertility went into my imagination.
ROFL
I called it a Ripitoutofme
Better be careful…
http://www.webmd.com/men/news/20070222/study-suggests-vasectomy-dementia-link
Too late… My wife’s eye rolls get more & more exaggerated all the time.
Very cool project, very well done.
In one sense this is the world’s slowest optocoupler. :D
Slow optocoupler? What about Morse code by eyeblinks?
After I turned 50 I started peeing in morse code organically ???? Just saying
I know HaD’s argument against a ‘like’ button, but still…
Very nicely done! This girl is going to turn out just fine.
One change that would really make this more interesting would be to put some distance between the sender & receiver and shoot the water in tight streams like you see in water displays. That would really draw in the crowd and better show that the two are only connected by water.
I had a wire-wrap tool before but I lost it. I’m kind of surprised how expensive it is to replace it. $20+ for one that can strip wire.
Personally, the most impressive thing here is the morse code decoder on the receiving end. That’s a pretty non-trivial piece of software for a fifth-grader!
It’s Arduino, you just have to import the right library, almost everthing has already be done… Still impressive.
This is the perfect mix of cool and pointless, I want one!
Great Job
Another thought, would be a really cool display/exhibit in a science museum.
Add some food coloring to the water to make it easier to see… :-)
If the “drips” are all the same volume (well short volume and long volume) you could probably decode messages by just weighing the water as you catch it at the bottom, well assuming you have some kind of debounce in the scale.
A piezo would work.
When she can do this with coffee… into my cup… then I’ll be impressed! ;-)
Great learning exercise, if you have the budget for such elaborate useless machines. I guess you can call it art and get some collector to buy it, or tear it down for the next exploration of ideas. Then again it is about the journey and not the destination, right?
All of life is about the journey and not the destination. That is, unless you’re suicidal.
My gadgets always first say, “Heavens to Murgatroid!”
Mine usually first say some sort of error code. :(
Great project. My daughter is 5 and I look forward to making things with her just like this! I give you 10 dad points!