Illumaphone: Light Based Musical Instrument With Arduino

Coffee cups and music. Bliss!

This DIY truly is. It lets you make music with light, from coffee cups and Arduino, just how it’s shown in the video below. Its magic component is a photo resistor. A photo resistor is a device, whose resistance fluctuates, based on visible light. You can read more about it in the blog or on the internet. But you don’t really need the info for this DIY, it’s for your personal knowledge. But like mentioned, this project does expect you to know basic Arduino and installing and setting ChucK.

You need 6 photo resistors, 1 Arduino Uno, alligator clips, wire, breadboards, 6 coffee cups, cardboard for the base and a laptop to process data and generate sound. You can start with putting a photo resistor in the base of each cup. Arduino reads the data from the sensors and transmits it to the laptop. ChucK reads this data and converts them to music.

You can see the blog and figure out how to wire the project. You will need a lot of wires because we are using 6 different photo resistors. The guide gives a lot of hacks to make it simpler and improvise options, so be sure, to read it to the very end. You can get the Arduino sketch and ChucK download link from the blog.

And you are ready to start your own band!