If you ever wanted to make an occasion festive with bubbles, [Sandeep_UNO] may have the project for you. As you can see in the video below (and, yes, it should have the phone rotated and it doesn’t), his Arduino uses a servo motor to dip a bubble wand into soap solution and then pulls it in front of a fan. The entire operation repeats over and over again.

There’s not a lot of detail and no code that we could find, but honestly, if you know how to drive a servo motor from an Arduino, the rest is pretty easy to figure out. Look closely at the motion of the robot. What is often accomplished with a spinning wheel of bubble wands and a constant fan becomes much more interesting when applied intermittently. The lazy cadence is what you expect to see from human operation and that adds something to the effect.

We’ve seen faster bubble blowers, but they were not so simple. We’ve even looked at other bubble-blowing robots. If you want to find out more about servo motors in general, our own [Richard Bauguley] has what you need to know.

“Data transparency” is a project by Jiayu Liu, a designer and media artist, interested in physical data visualisation and interactive code. The installation runs on Arduino Mega: when the microphone senses a person’s blow, it transforms it in a Led animation and then activates the bubble machine for 8 seconds. The project is not aiming to visualize any specific data but “data visualization” itself:

In my point of view, data is not dissimilar to a conclusion of our past, and we need it for our future. When we see a data from a computer, it is something that has already happened. We use intelligent methods of computing science to analyze the data so that to predict the future. We are living in a world of data, and data is like a language objectively describing our past. In this work, I take more attention on rethinking and recalibrating the role of data in our lives, and the relationship between the virtual world we build as a main method of data storing, analyzing and visualization and ourselves.

Also, I am thinking of that it is better to make sense of the role of data visualization before really visualizing it. Finally, I found a good perspective to see how data connects with our lives, which is Time.
Therefore, the project is not aiming to visualize any specific data but what I am trying to visualize is the “data visualization” itself. I would like to bring a new experience to the viewer in different space. So I want to create a interesting play space and bubble game to the viewer . Let them have a really funny and relaxing experience.

Take a look at the “making of” video below to see it in action:

Thomas Renck is a coder and a maker. He went to Disneyland, saw a bunch of little kids having fun with bubble guns and realized that a bubble blaster is a sure way to measurably improve joy and happiness in life.

Back home, it took only two hours to create and add-on to automate the bubble blaster using a 3d printer, Arduino Micro and a servo:

On his blog you can find the tutorial, the sketch and the 3d files to make one yourself and bring more happiness in your life too!

Inspired by a Jeep’s falling water display, Matt Bell created an Arduino-based bubble display, which turns Jeep’s idea on its head. Matt’s latest version makes a few key improvements that help with the bubble size and steadies the speed at which the bubbles rise. For consistent bubble movement, Matt recommends using mineral oil and keeps each “bubble channel” (as I like to call it) in its own vinyl tube. We’re looking forward to seeing the improvements that the next version brings! [via Arduino]

More:

• Bit.fall
• Sequencing Valve Controls Six Streams of Water
• Swinging in the Rain from MAKE Volume 25

Coder Matt Bell is continuing to improve his exceedingly clever water-based display screen.

Inspired by a Jeep display that spelled out words with falling water, Bell’s design consists of a water tank connected to a grid of clear plastic tubes and an Arduino. Individual solenoid valves at the bottom of each tube can let in air, creating the effect of individual white pixels on a black screen, and preprogrammed sequences can spell out letters or numbers. His newest version adds an air reservoir to control the size of the bubbles, as well as completely separate vinyl tubes rather than one large tank with dividers.

More about the build-instructions and inspiration can be read here and here.

Via:[TheVerge]