As GT students, we have all experienced the desire for a good rest at the end of the day. What could be more relaxing than a cool animated night light? Whether you're feeling satisfied from a day of good work or tired of debugging a project, the view of Buzz flapping its wings on your ceiling will make you excited for what comes tomorrow.
Inspiration
Inspired by digital sundials and barrier grid animations.
Features
- Shadow barrier-grid animation of Buzz flying on your ceiling
- Calming white noise from the whirring motor to help you fall asleep
How I built it
I used a free sketching app to create three silhouettes of Buzz, and used Animbar to generate the base image and bars for the barrier grid animation. I printed them out, cut them out, and attached them to acrylic sheets. For the movement, I decided to use a motor with encoder and programmed an Arduino nano to control the motor position and speed using the encoder feedback. The motor rotates the curved acrylic sheet with bars while keeping the light source in place, emulating the shifting of the bars in a typical barrier grid animation. I then used a cardboard box and other miscellaneous materials I found to hold everything together.
Challenges I ran into
- Testing/determining the right thickness of stripes to use, since the width will be enlarged (as they are closer to the light source than the base image) and determined by the distance of the light source, unliked traditional barrier-grid animations.
- Figuring out how to control the motor speed and position using encoder feedback and an Arduino nano
- Creating the base/box structure to hold everything together
Built With
- acrylic-sheets
- arduino
- buzz
- printer
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