IAT320 Sketch 2 - Day 2

March 10:

We also played around with many sensors/actuators, testing out which one we wanted to use and how fast the response is for each sensor. We played with the humdity/temperature sensor, and we found out that the response from it is very slow and it would be hard to use if we wanted to do the heartbeat concept, for it would take too long and too much effort to get the sensor at optimum right when we present it.





We tried out the light sensor and the accelerometer and found out that the readings from the two sensors responded quite well, therefore, we chose to use the constellation concept.
Actually, the light sensor was the quite sensitive to the amount of light detected, and the accelerometer is a bit slow on the response and it is most sensitive detection position is along the x and y axis.



We went over our concept from yesterday, and wanted to improve/add on/re-iterate some of the finer details so that we knew what we needed in terms of materials, technology, programming and production of the whole project.

Final concept is to have 3 constellations sewn onto a t-shirt. We want to use fiber optics to stick out of the shirt to act as 'stars' that form a certain constellation, the fiber optics are lit with the help of white LEDs. We also had random stars to add onto the shirt for aesthetics, which glows from the blue LEDs.

The light sensors affect which constellation will light up: the side of the shirt that has 2 constellations, one of them will light up when the environment is slightly darker, and the other will light up when the environment is slightly brighter. And for the constellation on the other side of the shirt, it will turn on and off depending on how dark the environment is.

For the accelerometer, when the wearer of the shirt is moving, the constellations will light up , and when the person is not moving, the constellations will blink - the speed of the blinking will depend on the amount of sudden movements the sensor detects. There will also be random stars beside the constellation that blink randomly for aesthetic purposes.

Therefore, we figured out that we need: 3 white LEDs for the constellations, 2 blue LEDs for the random stars and death star, 1 Arduino board, lots of conductive thread, 2 light sensors, 1 lily-pad accelerometer, 1 t-shirt, and a handful of fiber optics.