Bat gloves in progress

Last Autumn I started playing around with Tony Messina’s Simple Bat Detector circuit. I made a few boards and got as far as sticking one of them in an mp3 player armband …before the local bat population went into hibernation!

After being in the park one evening recently with bats swooping low overhead, I decided it was time to dig out the circuits again and get them tested and used.

Over the winter I’ve only been able to test with the ultra-sonic rangefinder I use in my sonar goggles, so I knew the circuit works, but I needed to see if it worked with airborne moving targets!

Simple bat detector

I rehoused the armband detector into something more sturdy and finally managed to coordinate with dusk and dry(ish) weather the other night to give it it’s first testing in the field.

It works!

I wandered around the park the other evening and found a bat flightpath that was conveniently located above a bench. I was able to use the detector to pick up a few clicks each time the bats zipped past. A really nice moment of making the invisible audible. If you know what I mean.

Bat gloves in progress

Meanwhile, however, I’m really unhappy with the crystal earpiece as the interface through which to experience this somewhat magical thing, so I’ve been working with some soft circuit techniques to develop some bat gloves.

There’s still a lot of sewing to do and, I expect, quite a lot of testing down at the park as well, but I’m really happy with the early experiments and how these transform the whole interaction.

That’s all I’m going to say for now…