I’ve been talking about Disco Boxing for a long time, but now I’ve finally laid out what it is, and how it was made. This post is going to be updated until it’s entirely complete which will probably be a week or so.

Disco Boxing is an interactive boxing project created by Mick Zimmerman, Clark Agre, Mike Anderson and myself which made it’s first debut at Artscape 2009. The idea is based off of the classic “strong man” carnival competition, the harder you hit, the more lights fire off. This blog post is arranged mostly for anyone curious about how we built the Disco Box using fairly simple and inexpensive methods.

A Basic Description: Disco Boxing is comprised of two walls, 8ft tall by 8ft wide and arranged to create a corner. Hanging in the middle of the “room” is a mid weight punching bag. Inside the punching bag we implemented a system to embed pressure sensitive switches which determine how hard a punch is being thrown at the bag. From there the information is sent to a computer running Max/MSP where we created a custom program to send data to an Arduino micro-controller which is then in turn connected to all 96 lights arranged on the wall.

Unfortunately at this time I do not have the edited video documentation, that will be coming shortly though, I promise.

Here’s the rest of our photos and video,

Now for a more in-depth description of what makes Disco Boxing. Starting from the beginning of the interaction and tracing all the way back to the end product. Not sure if this is the best way to explain this, but let’s give it a shot?

The Punching Bag: For the bag we used an old beat up punching bag that had definitely already seen its fair share of abuse. We gutted out the bag removing a good amount of it’s stuffing, which to our surprise was minced old clothing. We decided to use a Wii Fit board and harvest the pressure sensitive switches it came with because they are remarkable quality for the price, and the sensors come attached to a Blue-tooth module for wireless data transmission. We then placed the sensors in between to fairly firm plastic painting buckets so that the sensors were safely tucked away. We decided that since Disco Boxing’s first appearance was at Artscape (a 3 day long festival) that we wanted to connect the Wii Fit to hardwired power and now rely on batteries, since they would most likely need to be replaced.

The Software: Max/MSP is a program developed mostly for musicians to make very interactive programs in which to alter sound, however it later versions of the program are incredibly adept to working with the Arduino micro-controller. So we used a program called Osculator which takes many different wireless devices and converts their input to midi data. We then used Max/MSP and wrote a custom program, or “patch” as Max developers call it, to interpret the data the Wii Fit sends and then route that to the Arduino micro-controller. The Arduino is programmed in C to understand the data coming from Max and send that to the electrical system.

The Electronics: For the electronics side, as mentioned previously, we decided to use an Arduino Mega. The Mega is the most powerful Arduino yet, and is capable of many more outputs and inputs then ever before. We built a case, we nicknamed “The Brain” which sat behind one of the walls. We used a heavy duty case and dropped in our micro-controller along with 48 relays which the connected to the 96 lights 40 watt bulbs. We used 1, 900mA relay to control two 40 watt bulbs on the wall. We decided to have the light control reflected from the two boards, for budget reasons and to save time seeing as most of our lighting animations in mind played off the idea of this reflected line.

Here’s the rest of our photos and video,