It looks like a joke, using electronics to automate an action that’s meant to stimulate awareness, but hear me out.
Say you meditate regularly and strike the bowl gong each time. Your mind will associate the sound with the mental state you’ve practiced in meditation.
Now, if you hear the bowl gong outside the context of meditation, it could help snap you out of your day-to-day autopilot and bring you back to that state of awareness.
There are a couple ways this could be used.
You might train your mind to maintain awareness for longer periods of time by playing the gong at short intervals. For example, have the bowl gong sound every five minutes for half-an-hour. Then challenge yourself to maintain presence and awareness for five minutes until the next time the gong is struck. It’s harder than it sounds! If your mind has wandered, then gently return to that state of awareness.
Over time, you’ll be able to retain presence for longer periods of time, with or without the bowl gong. You may also notice which activities cause you to lose focus.
Another way to use the interval bowl gong would be to have it sound occasionally throughout the day. Each time you hear it, pause what you are doing and listen to the sound until you can no longer hear it. Then reset your intention to maintain awareness as you continue your day.
Why Not Digital? #
Interval timers with bowl gongs and chimes and bells already exist as apps on your phone. I wanted to use a physical bowl gong to keep it separate from the distracting and unfocused nature of phones. Also, knowing that a real instrument is making the sound changes how you perceive it.
Technical Details #
The Arduino runs a small program that tells the two servos when and how much to rotate. The timing and angles were very important in getting the little arm to take a proper swing at the bowl. The arm also had to be explicitly told to back off as soon as it struck the bowl so it would continue to ring.
Keen observers will see a potentiometer hooked up to the Arduino. I used that to tweak the rotation values at runtime so I didn’t have to recompile and upload the code to the Arduino quite as often. The rotation values were being streamed to the output monitor so I could update the code.
Future Directions #
The servos are too noisy. You hear the shriek of gears as the little robotic arm winds up before the soothing sound of the gong. I briefly explored other options, like using a linear actuator to strike the bowl or winding up some string which raises and then releases the mallet.
However, I never got a chance to use it to practice my focus, so I got distracted by other ideas…
