My original plan was to make a dragon mural with Jayden Guan and William Kim. I was going to make the dragon head with 10 LEDs along its neck and one LED on the eye (it says 5 on the plan for some reason but it was going to be 11 in total). I was also going to add capacitive touch for my input. We also decided to use the infrared sensors on each of our CPX’s to send signals to each other, making the whole dragon able to light-up from the bottom. Above the dragon head would be three letters: I, S, and B. The code for my part would light up from the neck, one by one going up to the eye when my capacitive touch is touched 1 time, send signals to the other dragon parts when the capacitive touch was touched 2 times, when the bottom part of the dragon receives the signal, it lights up from the bottom, one by one, until it gets to the middle section of the dragon. Then, the middle section—which was waiting after it received the signal—would also light up from its bottom LED. After that, my part would light up from the neck to the eye so the whole dragon would be lit up. When my capacitive touch was touched 3 times, it would do something else that was not decided at that time.

The main change was when I was actually making the project, I realized that 11 LED was not exactly doable in the time we had, so I decided to scale it down to 6 LEDs, and if it’s still too much for the time, I would’ve done the 3 important LEDs—I decided to do 4 LEDs (three on neck, and one on eye). Even though I scaled down a lot of the other parts, the code did not change much, except that I removed when it was touched 3 times, since I just couldn’t decide what it should do when it was touched 3 times.

In this project I learned how to use the infrared sensors.  Before, I’ve worked on some projects that had infrared sensors on them, but I never really got to actually using them in my project. We tested them out since we had no idea how it would work, and what the range is, but I was really surprised how far away they can be since I thought they had to be almost touching to send and receive signals from each other. Knowing that, I realized where we had to put the CPXs for it to work, but sadly, even though we tried to put them as close as possible, the bottom piece is still out of range. Now that I know how exactly the infrared sensors would work, it gave me many new ideas I can maybe make later on in life that wasn’t possible without the infrared sensor.

PROCESS PHOTOS:

 

Final Project