First Amendment Billy Bass
---- He Speaks Freely Now----
For this project I took a big mouth billy bass and gave it bluetooth capabilities. To achieve this I have a disassembled bluetooth speaker with a microphone listening to it. The microphone sensitivity is adjusted so it will be set off when the speaker is playing but not from outside noise. The microphone is connected to an arduino nano which controls the movement mechanism. I originally planned to use the existing mechanism that the fish came with but ended up having to rebuild it because the one I bought was too broken.
------- Build Photos -------
I built a new plaque for the fish to sit on using a combination of wood and plastic. The top and sides were made with wood on a laser cutter and the bezels and other parts that would be harder to make out of wood were printed using a 3d printer. I used parts from the original mechanism and servos to rebuild the movement system. The sound comes from a speaker which was modified to fit onto the front of the plaque roughly where the button would be on a normal big mouth billy bass. The arduino and servos are powered by a separate battery pack because they drew too much power to be run off the same battery as the speaker. The speaker battery can be charged with a micro usb cable at the base of the control panel.
------- User Testing -------
In my user testing the testers gave the device an average rating of 9/10. The testers were given 4 tasks: Turn the speaker on, connect it to a phone, play something on the speaker, and then turn the speaker off. All of the testers said that it was not harder to turn on and use than a normal bluetooth speaker. They all also said that the added functionality of the fish made the speaker better. When asked what they liked/disliked about the device some said that they liked the fish and one said that the buttons were hard to press.
When asked about what they would add/change on the device there were some recurring themes. One thing that all of them said was they thought it could be improved making the fish move less jerkily and make it react to the vocals of the song rather than just to any sound. Some also said it could be improved by making the buttons on the control panel easier to press
