This iteration was mentally + physically frustrated for me, however while i am writing this post, I feel accomplished and honored. I started my second iteration with some research, yes, I am looking forward to make a lamp which is responsive to sound, however, what if the colors also had a meaning. Last week I downloaded an app called f.lux which changes your screen color to shades of yellow-red just like the color of The Sun. The reason behind f.lux is the application offering their customers more efficient sleep cycles, with keeping them away from melatonin killing white light.
So I decided to integrate this idea with my project. I started with sketches, since the color palette is based on the Sun, I wanted to have a round ball shaped plaster sun. I did some sketches to finalize my idea.
I decided to build my object by starting from the top part ( sun ) I decided to find an origami of a ball, and then cast it. I build the origami.
Materials:
1- Paper
2- Plaster
3-Bowl of warm water
4- Basketball
5-Tape
And then I plastered it, however there were bunch of problems rising, such as I plastered a paper it was already stuck to it, ofcourse after getting wet plaster lost the ball shape. Since I used so many layers the drying took so long.
I needed a new object, so I decided to plaster cast my suite mates basketball. It was huge and it was going to take so much time, but it was the only object I was able to get my hands on at that moment.
As it was expected a lot of problems occurred with the basketball,first of all it took, sooo long to get dry, and it was nearly impossible cut it out easily, while i was taking it out it already lost its shape and I also popped the ball… After spending around 3 hours on this, all I created was a master mess.
I took a break and next morning I started working again, I did new sketches and ended up with a totally different design.
For the design I wanted to use plywood and translucent sheet.
The size of the box : 10in width, 5in height, 3in depth
I built the box however, There were still many problems… First of all the plywood i bought from utrecht was bent, so the Elmer’s Glue-All MAX did not stick. I thought the problem was the glue type, so I decided to go and but Elmer’s Wood Glue, however, that glue did not work too. So I had to use tape.
The second part I worked on was the translucent paper.
I was not really satisfied with the look of the object yet, I was planning on doing some alignments after the second most important part, wiring and coding. So as I got inspired from f.lux I decided to do a little of math.
Materials:
1- Photoresistor
2- 12 LED’s
3- Real Time Clock
4- 13 Resistor (12, 330) and (1, 10K)
First of all, I connected the LED’s with resistors. All of the LED’s are connected to digital pins number 2 to 13. Two LED, from the end are red, because they create the sunset color.
Green wires = Analog inputs
Yellow wire = Digital inputs
Black = – (ground)
Red = + (vcc)
After that, I connected the photoresistor, so that the LED’s will be responsive to light. The light change happens when the brightness reaches 400, mapped between 0-1023.
The last piece was the Real Time Clock, which took me a while to understand, however I got it working. But, Real Time Clock’s code is not ready yet, so the durations are based on x200 faster version.
So this is what it looked like so far;
And then I put everything in the object I created.
As I said before I was not really satisfied with the object, so I decided to go to some renovations. One of the useless glues that I bought was gonna be the main decor of the object.
I finished the object and I was really satisfied with it. It looked really really nice when I turned of the lights.
These are the videos of the lights; before we watch I want to talk about the math behind the lights. In order to divide the day into intervals I had to find out about average sunrise / sunset time. I declared sunrise time as 6AM and sunset time as 8PM. A day is 24 hours but this lamp only represents 14. 14 hours = 504500000milliseconds I divided that by 4. Because I have 12 LED’s and i had to make them represent different intervals. The Result was 126125000 milliseconds. Every 3 LED represents 3.5 hours of a day so I needed to find how many seconds between just 2 of them. So I divided the number by 3 and the answer was 4204166 milliseconds. This is the technique I can use without using Real Time Clock, but that would be cheating. However, since I am going to work on the code in the following days for the next iteration, I decided to make a demo which is 200x faster then real time example. 14 seconds between every led represents 1.15 hour. While the day goes, lights act up with it and the saturation / brightness of the color changes.
On my next iteration, I am looking forward of adding microphone so that I can program the Arduino to respond to sound. Also I want Real Time Clock to be working. + Design improvements.
I am adding some extra pictures and videos =
Code :
Master Code-
Display Code-
Logic code-
Sense code-
link to the folder:
https://github.com/emres13/DT-Lab-2-/tree/master/iteration_2_code1