TONER, 2004

A solar flare erupts from the surface of our Sun. The solar flare is observed by The Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO – a NASA/ESA spacecraft), the strength of the flare is transmitted to Earth and broadcast via a NASA website, a laptop monitors the website, the laptop communicates with a microcontroller, the microcontroller trips a relay, the relay connects a car battery to a coil of nichrome wire inside a borosilicate glass tube.

The result is a tone.

Just playing about... I wanted to make an automatic hoot-pipe, so I did (with a little help from RCA technical staff and some advice from some kindly researchers at Imperial College London).






A solar flare – many times the size of Earth – captured by SOHO. For more information, click here...






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