What if you could fly a kite inside?

The ultimate test of a designer is making an interaction so delightful that users want to play with it over and over again, even if it’s not productive. This was the goal as I began working on my kite. I wanted users to be able to use their breath to blow away a kite.

Demo Day

Internal Componants

Control Box Diagram

The kite’s control box features a 101 rpm 12V dc gear motor. This motor drives a system of gears attached to a pulley in order to pull the kite up the string. The control box also features a microphone which detects the sound of the user blowing into it.

Wiring Diagram

Lever Microswitch

This switch placed within the string’s path helped with locating the kite’s position to prevent it from getting tangled into the gears bottom of the pulley at the top of the system. When the kite was moving if the stops placed on the string hit the button, the system knew that the kite was at the top of the string if it was moving up or the bottom of the string if it were moving down.

SparkFun RedBoard Plus

The RedBoard was the microcontroller mediating the behavior of the system according the input from the user, in this case, them blowing into the mic.

SparkFun Sound Detector

The this handy SparkFun board provides an analog read of the amplitude of sound, making it perfect for detecting large changes in sound when the user blows on the microphone.

10k Trimpot Potentiometer

This potentiometer was programmed to adjust a threshold value for what audio input values will raise and lower the kite. This allowed for last minute adjustments to the system when in a louder room or increasing the sensitivity if in a quieter room to make a more enjoyable user experience.

101 RPM 12 DCV Gear Motor

This motor drives a system of gears attached to a pulley to pull the kite.

Motor Driver

This hardware controls the power and directionality of the DC motor.