For our midterm project, Annan and I are creating a “Happy Halloween” sign inspired by the Netflix show Stranger Things. We are going to attach a breadboard with the Arduino Nano, a lot of LED lights and a distance sensor to a mock-wall installation. The distance sensor that will tell the microcontroller how close a person is standing to the wall, and the closer they are the brighter the lights will be and the farther they are the dimmer the lights.
Oct 4th - presentation of ideas, and prototyping
Oct 11th - have a proper model working, user testing
Oct 18th - finalize project
Oct 25th - due date
Mock diagram of our project.
| Item | Amount | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| LED lights | ~100 | |
| microcontroller (Arduino Nano) | 1 | |
| breadboard | 1 | |
| time-of-flight sensor | 1 | |
| piece of board | 1 | |
| power (laptop?) | 1 | |
| wires + iron soldering | ∞ | |
| NeoPixels string LED lights | 30 lights/1 strip | $19.95 |
| Mylar sheets | 10 | $10.99 |
The first thing we tried to do was mock-up how the LED light will look pinned to a cardboard. To lengthen the pins of the LED light, we soldered a resistor to the longer leg and then soldered that onto a longer wire. Then we soldered the shorter leg to another wire. With the longer wires, we were able to connect them back to the breadboard’s power and ground, respectively.
Our first LED light trial test on the cardboard, working with the soldered wires.
Thanks to some of our labmates, we learned how to set-up a parallel and series circuit. A series circuit would mean they all line up and connect to the same power source in the same row on our breadboard, and the lights get dimmer as the number of lights in the same row increases. A parallel circuit can connect the same power and ground source, but via a resistor. The resistor connects each light to the power, and then the light can connect back to the same ground.
With the first test trial and refreshing our memory on circuits and LED lights, we were left with some questions that we’ll bring to the next workshop to ask for advice. The biggest issues we want to tackle is adding all the lights to the cardboard—we are worried that it might require a lot of time to solder wires onto each LED light, so we’d want to avoid unnecessary work if there is a better way. And most importantly, we’ll need help figuring out how to use the time of flight sensors to detect someone standing near the lights, as well as how to solder it on correctly so we can connect it to our breadboard.