This project was inspired by the traditional anklets, ghungroos often used in forms of Indian classical dance. These are traditionally covered in large bells, and are used to add percussive sounds to the dancers footwork. It is also an essential part of the performers' costumes, so we knew going into this that the design would be very important.
As dancers, my teammate Ananya and I have used these often, and wanted to bring a digital dimension to the traditional art form. By making the anklet more modern, and giving users the opportunity to change the sounds that are generated by their movements, we can also make these anklets more culturally diverse for dancers of other styles.
This project was a team effort between myself and two other students at Cornell Tech. I took on the following roles during this process:
For the first step for our circuit, we created a form of a pedometer using the accelerometer. We used the acceleration measured on the y axis to determine whether someone was taking a footstep. Below is an image of the circuit:
From here, we created a bash script to run every time a footstep was detected, and play the sound of the ghungroo bells. However, the delay we had programmed into the Arduino caused the audio to be less realistic, so we removed it and
We then decided to use RGB LED strips for the anklet, one strip for each row. Instead of having each row respond to movement in one axis, we wired these so that for each strip received either the R, G or B values from either the X, Y or Z axis. This way the colors for each row were always different, and would never be switched off.
As mentioned above, the design was critical since these anklets are often used as part of a costume. We wanted it to be comfortable and wearable, while still having a stage presence.
We began creating several iterations of paper prototypes, and we explored creating living hinges on paper and cardboard, as shown below. We were aiming to use this material as the prototype anklet.
After playing around with more versions of living hinges, we found one that worked for us, and was able to support the first version of our circuit on the breadboard:
Once we had decided on using the LED strips, we realized that the living hinge might not be able to showcase them in the way we wanted. We began experimenting with different fabrics, and settled on felt since we were able to laser cut it with precision.
We toyed with several design ideas for how to place the lights on to the felt, such as diffusing the light with another overlayed fabric, or adding ruffles for each row. However we found that weaving the lights through the felt showcased them most efficiently and still gave it that modern look we were hoping for.
Our final product included an HC-05 bluetooth module that would send the accelerometer data to a laptop, which would then emit the bell sounds. A 9V battery was used to power the lights and the bluetooth module.
Below is a video of our final product:
