HotPopRobot

We love space, we love science, and we love making.

And there is no better project than merging all our interests into one… and that was the idea behind the Cosmic Dance!

We live in a fascinating universe. It is mysterious and alluring. But when you look deep and study it scientifically it starts to reveal some of its mysteries. Our existence is immersed in a soup of cosmic rays, UV rays, infrared, radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation. But human eye is only able to register radiation in wavelengths from about 390 to 700 nm.

The rest of the music remains unheard and unseen… and this is why we created the Cosmic Dance installation so that we can dance to the sounds of the Universe.

Our Cosmic Dance installation was created for Maker Festival Toronto. Since then we have updated the same. We had some awesome handcrafted traditional Puppets from India. We connected them to servos using strings and had them affixed to an old Ikea baby diaper changing table. We with mixing things from everyday things including old things in our new creations.

Once the Puppets were motorized we took some sensors, including X-Ray Sensors (Geiger Tubes), UV and infrared sensors and hooked them to Arduino and wrote a dedicated code to take inputs from these sensors and create unique output signals.

These unique signals were then used to control the servos and make the puppets dance.

Every time the sensors detected signals from the Universe, the Puppets started to dance – to the sounds of the Universe!

The climax would be a Supernova explosion which should make the puppets go wild…. will it be the Betelgeuse dance?