Puppeteer Motion-Capture Costume

Step 8 WIRELESS COMMUNICATION

The design of the first Puppeteer costume was intentionally connected through a physical wiring, which the performer herself could disconnect, by unplugging herself. These were early stages and at first we used two Arduino USB boards to read the data from all 12 sensors, since the Arduino comes with 6 analog inputs. An improved version of this scaled down to one Arduino, using four of its six analog inputs directly and one of them in combination with an eight channel multiplexer.

The next Puppeteer suit became wireless, giving the dancer freedom to move around with no physical connection to the computer reading the sensor data. The only restrictions were those of the range of the Bluetooth module. We worked with the Sparkfun BlueSMiRF Gold module in connection with the Arduino LilyPad. The Bluetooth connection, though it worked, was very flaky so that for the third Puppeteer version we happily started working with the XBee, which has proved to be a great solution to all our wireless problems.