We went to Novalia today, which is a place where you make touch-sensitive posters. When you touch a certain picture of the poster, it brings up music! Each picture brings up different sounds! This is because of a special circuit board on the back.

First, you connect the circuit to a Raspberry Pi, and download some kind of music to it. After that’s done, you disconnect it from the Pi and connect a battery pack and a speaker to it. The circuit does play music when you touch one of the gold rectangles on the back, but it’s so quiet that even if you pressed your ear to it, you wouldn’t hear a thing! The speaker makes it louder, but it needs some electrons to send to the sound wave to do so. Luckily, the batteries in the battery pack is filled with those! So it sends the electrons over to the speaker and voila!  You have touch-sensitive music! Now all we need to do is turn it into a poster.

The posters in Novalia all have a little hole in the back of them, which has some rectangles of ink on the bottom – the same ink used for the poster. Each ink square in the hole connects to the ink of a certain picture on the poster. When the circuit board secures to the ink, the squares connect to each other. The ink in the hole is sticky, which helps to secure the circuit in place. Once they come in contact, the sound waves travel through the ink to the front of the poster and act as the golden squares.

And that’s it! That’s how a Novalia poster works! Fred explained this to us. Fred works at Novalia and is Aaron’s friend’s dad. His son (Aaron’s friend) is called Ollie, and the two have been together since reception!

Posted by Avni   

On 17/08/2018, I went to a company called Novalia, who are making touch-sensitive posters! Their first ever poster was a drum kit and I got to learn how they worked. Fred is my friend’s dad. He works at Novalia as an engineer. Fred had invited us to visit his company. When we got there, we discussed about the events we attended. After that, Fred showed the circuit boards and explained about how they make it.

First, they create sound on a circuit board, which they make louder with an amplifyer. This circuit board will be stuck on to some sticky ink printed on the back of the touch pads. The ink strips work like wires and connect to the touch pad, this works because this special ink has carbon in it so it conducts  electricity.

When you touch the touch pad in the front of the poster the electrons are attracted to your fingers and rushed up towards it. This makes the sound waves move to the front of the poster and turns in to music which is really cool!!!.

Posted by Aaron  

Posted by Fred (@Novalia)