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,

(more…)