I wrote an essay on how those films inspire me reflect upon technology. You can read it [HERE]. For the project sake, such famous sci-fi movies draw people's attention. Then we could engage on conversations about the artistic pieces as well as my designing decisions. On that matter, it was a success. So, let's start by the components of the project.

Two elements: the keys and the support base containing an Arduino board, speakers and a Raspberry Pi Board.

I used magnet as connectors. They kept the keys in the right position inasmuch they are fairly decent conduits. Once the boxes were light weighted, the magnets could be small and still maintain the keys in the place.

The system identifies the keys using a straight forward mechanism. In the support base there were four connectors: one for the ground (GR), one for the Annihilation key (1), one for the 2001 key (2), one for the Arrival key (3).

All keys have a ground connector. Each key has its correspondent connector in a particular distance in relation to the GR. That way, the support base could know which Arduino digital pin was activated. The Arduino board was responsible for light up the LED inside the keys. 

If you are asking yourself what Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards are, here we go!

They are both Rapid Prototyping microcontrollers [tiny computers]. They are flexible platforms for electronic prototyping. So to say, they can be used for different proposes and more than one.

Arduino is an electronic prototyping platform. It is probably the most used around the world by hobbyists, designers and artists. 
It has a software interface (the IDE) and a hardware interface (the board). Mainly, the community behind it is huge with many open projects and users to ask for help online.

Different ideas can be tested using the platform once various sensors, motors and other electronic components can be plugged in and out without soldering. No need to compromise your microcontroller with a single code. A new code can override the past compiled. That's why it is so useful!

In Monolito the keys are identified by the arduino board when they were placed in the support base containing electronic boards and speakers. The board knows wich key was placed based on the digital pin triggered. 

The next step is to transfer this informaion to the Raspberry Pi. 

The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer. It was developed to promote teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries. The original model became far more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses such as robotics, image manipulation application and others.

It functions as a computer, so you can connect to it peripherals likes monitor, keyboards, mice. An Linux based operating system make it popular to the Open Source community. So to say, you can make programs to be executed by the Raspberry Pi. 

I made a (Frankstein monster kind of) Python code. And this is the huge advantage of using thoses platforms. For people like me, making a project as this is possible even not being very familiar with programimg or hardware. 

This Python program received a command to play a mp4 file from Arduino. So it did, once the speakers were connected to the Raspberry Pi board.

For each of the keys I selected an audio file. For the Arrival film it was this one:

The most valuable takeaways of this project were the conversations during the event. Talks about better ways of designing this project, other applications for those platforms and technology in general. 

It was the first time I attempted to work with Raspberry Pi and Python. After much suffering and clear realizations I had no idea of what I was doing, I began to visualize potential forms to include those tools into my creative process. Also, I could have a better picture of which skills I needed to learn. None of this I could get without attempting to do it. Mostly, this project is about hands-on learning.

Big thanks to Camila Alves for the help and company during the event (+ the day before).