I really struggled with this weeks homework, I haven’t been feeling very creative lately and honestly I am not the biggest fan of any of my ideas… but here they are anyway.
My first idea and the one I guess I feel the most strongly about is this wall art light thing that lights up when you walk in the room so you don’t feel like you are coming home to a dark apartment. Here are my sketches, I also made a quick prototype because I have a very hard time describing its function (I will bring it to class).
I’m hoping the function of the light is feasible.
My second idea is a light that sits in your bedroom or I guess in any room you want it, and it signifies the time of day based on its colours. So in the morning it will be a bright white/yellow to let your brain know it is time to be awake and active, when it is approaching the night it starts to shift to a more red light to communicate its time to start winding down. Innovative… I know….
Here is the sketch.
For my third and final idea, I was thinking of making a insulated travel mug that detects the liquid inside the mug and displays a light ring around where the liquid is at so you don’t accidentally drink too much. Typically these travel mugs are not translucent and contain a lid, I frequently spill on myself with these types of cups.
Anyways let me know your thoughts 🙂
These are all really fun brainstorms, Lauren! Have any of these ideas grown on you since class Wednesday? Ideas per pitch below. Let me know on slack or email if you have more questions or want to chat more about any or all of these.
1. This lamp is very feasible given the time and tools we have available. In Sige’s bin for our class, you’ll find a PIR motion sensor (i think there are ~5 in the bin), which is the perfect thing to use for this project https://learn.adafruit.com/pir-passive-infrared-proximity-motion-sensor sorry i missed seeing your prototype in person, can you post a video of it? What materials were you thinking of using? It looks like laser-cut acrylic in your sketch.
2. Color changing mood lamps are a big market. Your design is novel and attractive, but I just want to bring up that this is a crowded space that you should research so you can differentiate yours.
3. This is a funny idea for a funny problem. You could accomplish this with a vertical strip of LEDs along the outside of the cup, and a copper tape liquid level sensor on the inside (make sure it’s copper tape with nonconductive adhesive, or a nonconductive cup inside– no metal). I think a ring around would require too many LEDs since the change happens on the vertical axis only. If you don’t want the copper tape to touch your beverage, you can use an entirely nonmetal cup and capacitive touch sensing with copper tape on the outside of the cup. https://www.hackster.io/team-protocentral/non-contact-capacitive-liquid-level-sensing-using-fdc1004-9333c7 here’s a neat sensor that could be used to tell only when the cup is very full or very empty, depending where you put it: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2463.html