To use sensors as a mode of on/off within my installation, I decided to use a Bela board mini. I have experience using this micro-computer and know where to find useful information and advice for it so I felt confident it would be an appropriate tool for the project.
I first followed one of the Bela tutorials for a distance sensor. The tutorial uses an ultra-sonic distance sensor wired to the Bela board (through bread board) which takes the distance input and prints it within the Bela testing website.
Below is a video demonstrating how the sensor works when following the Bela tutorial.
I then combined this with a Pure Data patch I previously used to play audio, which was by using the abstraction ‘PlayAudioFile’, I was not succeeding by combining these together, so I decided to use a simpler option ‘open one.wav’ and trigger it with ‘loadbang’.
This patch made the audio file play and the sensor read information but it did not use the sensor information to trigger the sound.
Final patch
By adding the object “spigot” and loadbang 0 (off) and loadbang 1 (on) before the message to open and play the wav file, the patch was able to load and recognise it was not to immediately start as there is a message to delay it.