Meet Fred, the whimsical new musical shredder developed by a team of BA Interaction and Moving Image students from the London College of Communication (LCC).

The team of second and third year students, Rafael Filomeno, Kate Pincott and Young Kim are aiming to bring joy to the workplace with a project they developed as part of an ‘Arduino Hack day’ held by ad agency Iris Worldwide back in February.

Briefed to ‘Make SXSW Smile’, participating teams were challenged to hack an everyday object, gadget or device in an original and innovative way to amuse and excite visitors to the Interactive and Film Festival SXSW (South By South West) in Texas. Those taking part were asked to add some element of interactivity to their chosen object using an ‘Arduino’ – an electronic board that can sense the environment around and use data from its sensors to affect its surroundings – and thus the sartorially named ‘Fred the Shredder’ was born.

And now for the science part…

Choosing a paper shedder as their inspiration, the team from LCC added their Arduino board to the inside of the shredder’s engine along with some light sensors that read the colours and patterns shown on the paper fed in. This is then transformed into data and converted into sounds. Furthermore, with the Arduino it’s also possible to transmit data to a network, allowing the students to transform the data picked up by the sensors into social media posts and tweets.

The LCC students’ winning idea and prototype was recently taken by Iris to SXSW  (http://sxsw.com/) where they presented the ideas as the main subject of their talk at this year’s event.