Changes

My final project is actually different from what I proposed couple weeks ago. It is a colorful light box. I used Arduino to control the duration time bliking, and the order of blinking on each LED light bulb. The Arduino also connects to a photoresistor sensor to control the brightness and the blinking time delay of the whole LED’s set up.

The concept of this piece is more about artistic display of night flowers, especially epiphyllous, a kind of flowers that bloom for a single night only. The piece itself explores the ideas about day, night, light, flowers, and beauty through electronic. It is the combination between nature and technology.

Through the photoresistor sensor, when the light outside is dark, the light on each flower will be bright and blinking in sequence. The background light is also changing. However, when the light from outside is bright, like daytime, the flower lights will stop blinking and the brightness of the flowers lights does down.

Unfortunately, today as the day I will present my project, my freeduino board got burnt and stopped working in the morning. I can no longer use Arduino for my project. For now, I just put the whole set up with LEDs without interacting with the sensor or blinking lightshow. I still post the Arduino code that I had put together the past couple days, so you can understand what I intend to do, and how the project actually worked before the board was damaged.

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About the concept, since this project is about switch, I was thinking about what a switch usually related to. Usually, the concept about switch goes together with technology and electronic. The place where people can think the most about electric and technology are cities. When the sun goes down, and night comes, every one turns the switches to turn on their lights. A typical feeling about city life is a place where the light never goes off, and it can be seen clearly especially at night.

Working on the project, my original idea was to create multiple little building models by paper and but the little light bulbs inside each of them to create a little city. However, I did not have enough those little light bulbs, so I decided to create a very contrast city image in black and white and print them on a transparency paper, then put the light under the image as the background to light up and show the image clearly. The materials that I used were mostly paper, circuit board, two light bulbs, and electric wire.

It was a very simple switch project, but I think it was very interesting to work on it. After this project, I will probably display it in my room as a decoration light. To improve this project, I think I would make it again by using better material because paper is not a very reliable material to work with light heat and electricity. It could get burn easily if I am not careful. Also, the image can be replaced and print on better material. After all, after this project, I would love to work on it more and create more interesting features for this light box.