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…Feed a Rainbow

Maria Gabriella Astolfo | Alberto Granaiola | Alberto Moro | Kui Wang

Play with Rainbow, wear the Rainbow
Ride the Rainbow high and low
Spread the color of Rainbow wherever you go
Paint with Rainbow, create a magnificent show

(Syed Karim)

Feed a Rainbow is based on a Flickr’s RSS feed. When a Flickr user publishes a photo with a ‘rainbow’ tag, our machine starts to create many soap bubbles. At the same time a slide projector projects different colours, lighting up the bubbles. You can see a little rainbow in every bubble and play with it. When Feed a Rainbow starts to play, you know that at some place on the earth someone is looking at the rainbow in the sky.

How it works The slide projector is always on. Processing and the Arduino software work together. Processing takes the RSS feed from Flickr and sends a start signal (a current to the high to very-high connector). The bubble machine starts, depending on the Arduino signal.

Here is the URL of the RSS feed that the Processing software reads every minute to check if someone in the world has uploaded in Flickr a photo with the tag ‘rainbow’. And here is some of the Processing code:

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Hardware

- Analog slide projector
- Soap bubble machine
- Arduino
- High to very-high electronic connector

Software
- Processing
- Arduino