Talking COVID Mask - making people smile even when they don't always want to
With everyone wearing masks I found it to be difficult to tell when someone was talking… Plus people needed a laugh so I created this simple animated face mask that moves when I talk. I’ve seen others on the web… I think what makes this one perhaps unique is it uses a little bit of adaptive averaging to adjust the audio range to keep the lips moving even as the speaker’s volume changes over time and situation. I’ve been wearing this to lots of zoom meetings and it creates lots of smiles… Something much-needed these days. Hope you enjoy it ! Eager to see how people improve on the design
Ps. I based the code on a design that my son Max and I did for a Red Bull challenge several years ago where we put the same kind of talking apparatus on the grill of a 6 ton surplus army truck that we use at burning man. (see https://youtu.be/CejMA55O8L0)
- 1 Particle Photon https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13764 (can easily be adapted to any Arduino compatible device if you don’t need wifi programability)
- 80 pixels of 144 LED/m addressable Neopixel strip e.g. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1506
- 1 3-pin Electret microphone eg. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12758
- Thin Cloth facemask. Optimally translucent matte black
- USB serial cable
- USB battery pack
- Wire, tape, hot glue
- the Code – tested on a particle PHOTON which you can find in this repo
I developed this on a particle photon. It’s an Arduino compatible platform that has a nice web-based IDE that links to the chip via Wi-Fi. I have this set up so that it optionally looks for Wi-Fi… If found it will hook you up so that you can reflash the device wirelessly. If no Wi-Fi is found it just proceeds. The code is attached . The design could be easily adapted to any Arduino compatible device in a few minutes by taking out the particle specific stuff. I put in compile flags to allow that and got it to compile on any Arduino – but have not tested it. Shouldn’t be hard
The lights are 80 Neopixels from a 144 LED/M strip such as these .The LEDs Are arranged in eight vertical strips that are 10 LEDs each. They are soldered together and alternating directions to make an 8 x 10 matrix. I then hot glued the pack of the strips to a thin piece of mylar to hold them together. Note: I have experimented with flexible neopixel matrices like these but found that they were not flexible enough to be comfortable in a mask. Remember that the LED VCC needs to be wired directly to the USB VCC as the photon has a 3.3V and can’t supply the voltage or source the current needed for LED’s . I know it’s not completely kosher to run the new pixels data input 3.3 V but it works.
I used a 3 pin electret microphone with amplifier . I used just the module, but most folks sell them as part of a breakout board like this. Either will work. Note there are a few constants in the photon sketch you may need to adjust to work with the output levels of your mic. Position the mic so it will be roughly over your mouth
Our wonderful friend Gretchen made the mask for me. We did lots of experimenting here to find the right color and weight of the fabric and led colors. We found that sheer black fabric and pink color for the LEDS gave the best contrast in high light conditions. NOTE: even though I settled on a single uniform color, you can experiment with colors and color effects. I’m interested to see what others do with the expressiveness of other colors
If you’re using a particle photon… Go into the particle IDE create a new sketch and copy this code in. You must also include the libraries for the sparkintervaltimer and the neomatrix into the sketch. From that point you should be able to deploy on the photon
Enjoy ! -jc