Pushing Air Wind Instrument Trainer : 7 Steps

A precise and economical learning aid for the beginning wind instrument student.

Step 1: Hardware Setup

First I prepared my Pushing Air Wind
Instrument Trainer by attaching the Intel Edison Module to the Arduino Breakout Board. Then I attached the the Grove Shield to the Arduino Break Out Board.

Step 2: Software Instalation

Second, I downloaded all the software
associated with the project: Edison Devise USB Drive 1.2.1, Arduino Setup, Intel XDX IoT Edition, and Edison Yocto. After unzipping Edison Yocto I ran the Intel_jason program in order to flash my board to prove the whole setup was working. At this point Dan Hugo from Intel helped me connect the Intel Edison Virtual Com Port (COM4) to my Windows Surface computer running Windows 8.1.v

Step 3: Add Sensor

That is when I made my pivot. I
realized that I could re-purpose the water flow sensor and use it as a wind flow sensor to help students to learn how to more quickly master a wind instrument. Blowing through the sensor you get a numerical readout that can accurately register both the amount of pressure and the steadiness of the air stream. Both are necessary qualities that beginning students must learn.

Third, I chose sensors that might
address the drought problem in California such as a Grove moisture sensor, a mini water pump, and water flow sensor. With help from Intel's Windy Foster we got the moisture sensor working. The Arduino coding for the water flow sensor proved more difficult. After a careful search in the Arduino Genuino Forum and help from Dan and Windy we got it working by blowing air through it.

Step 4: Re-purpose Pivot

That is when I made my pivot. I
realized that I could re-purpose the water flow sensor and use it as a wind flow sensor to help students to learn how to more quickly master a wind instrument. Blowing through the sensor you get a numerical readout that can accurately register both the amount of pressure and the steadiness of the air stream. Both are necessary qualities that beginning students must learn.

Step 5:

Step 6: Deliver Student Data to Cloud

The idea here is to send student results to then cloud where the numerical data will be converted to a graft. students can view their progress over time. Time ran out before the details of connecting my device to the Intel cloud. The Intel team suggested that the problem might be a system overload. This will be a very useful feature that I plan to complete in the future.

As a work around it was suggested that I try Twillio to save and display student results. I will use instructions in another Intel Instructables to complete this project.