Someone/thing Listens - Part 1
Elizabeth Perez and I were assigned to work on our IPC midterm project together. The theme for the midterms is Halloween.
We started off our process by talking about Halloween — what it means to us, what we like about it and what we don’t. We pretty quickly agreed that the classic American Halloween tropes —bats, pumpkins, ghosts, orange&black— were not what we wanted to focus on. Rather we wanted to think about Halloween as the Day of the Dead, or the Pagan All Hallows Eve. We thought about communication with someone who has passed, or praying to saints/gods/godesses for strength (we both grew up Catholic), or praying to something for strength. We decided to make an ever-growing alter and a box that users could drop messages into. The box would trigger a sketch in P5 to run and then when the sketch finishes the box would light up. All of this would represent the users message being received. We decided to make a sketch that would look like fog starting at the bottom left corner and moving to the top right corner.
Below is a sketch of our concept from our first day of brainstorming:
Below is a sketch P5 idea and below that is a screenshot of the P5 sketch:
We then started to think about our materials and sensors. We talked about using a couple different types of sensors, maybe a force sensor etc. but we decided on a photo transistor because we thought we would get the most accurate read and it would fit nicely on the lip of the box. We also decided to start off our project by using a cardboard box and then once we have our measurements confirmed we will buy a box at the Container Store.
After doing a test with the photo transistor where we set up a circuit and red the incoming value in the serial monitor Anthony helped us realize that we would get a better read if included an LED facing the phototransistor, that way every time a piece of paper passed between the LED and the phototransistor we would get a dip in the read. See photos below:
After checking our serial plotter we saw that when the resistor was receiving full light it was around 60 and when it a piece of paper was passed between the LED and the phototransistor the reading was around 2.
We set up serial communication between our Arduino code and P5. In P5 we set inData to our variable that was recording the phototransistor’s reading. We put the Move() and Show() functions in an if statement to say that if the sensor reading is below 15 (meaning there is paper in front of the phototransistor) then start Move() and Show() otherwise (meaning if the reading is anywhere between 16 and 60) don’t do anything.
And we got it to work!!
…but there are still a couple of things we need to fix:
-Right now the sketch only moves when the signal is below 15 (so when the paper is in front of the sensor) so we need to add a delay
-We need to make sure the sketch resets once it hits the top right corner of the canvas.
-We also want to send a signal back to the Arduino to tell it to turn on the lights in the box when the animation resets (so when the sketch hits the top right corner).