The Whistle-Blower

Think about your last surfing vacations. You want to spend as much time as possible on your board or relaxing at home. Yet, to check the wind conditions you either constantly travel by car back and forth between your vacation house and the beach or spend hours scanning different wind websites. How can you avoid this unnecessary travel time while ensuring a peaceful digital-detox vacation?

Based on the idea of building a wind indicator without a digital screen, Whistle-Blower translates wind into drawings of sand. A wind sensor is placed on the beach side. At home, a drawing machine blows sand on a canvas in different directions and with different forces depending on the signals from the wind sensor. The canvas inside the drawing machine is exchanged on a daily base, thus creating a selection of different wind drawings. Those wind drawings represent an aesthetically appealing statistic of the changing wind conditions.

Whistle-Blower is an exploration using Arduino Uno with multiple input and output components. The wind sensor consists of two input components: a microphone and an optical sensor. The microphone is used to measure the wind force and controls the fan of the drawing machine. The optical sensor is attached to a flag and, thus, measures the direction of the wind. The measured angle is sent to a gear motor which rotates the fan of the drawing machine respectively.

The star shape of the drawing device is inspired by a compass which is an archaic device for navigation and orientation. Visually the color white and the semi-transparent material reflect the sand on the beach while blue represents the ocean water.