Title: Good Morning Sunshine
Project Statement:
Being responsible for one’s self and responsibilities is essential as a college student. These responsibilities include waking up in time for class, from a nap, or for an activity. The basic built-in phone alarms are boring and practical to some degree. The problem with these alarms is that they’re incredibly obnoxious and too easy to hit, snooze and fall back asleep. My alternative incorporates the old alarm system with LEDs to make a visually appealing and informational light-up sequence when the alarm goes off. Our work inspired this project with Arduino, Processing, and the LED strip in our recent recitation, having it react to music. This project aims to create a more effective and enjoyable method of waking up so the users will never be late again.
Project Proposal:
My project aims to assist college, and high school students, or anyone for that matter, in waking up. Even though people can wake up to the old alarms, they will wake up annoyed and groggy due to the gloomy mood of the environment when being forced out of bed. My project, using LEDs, will create a more cheerful environment when waking up, making the user feel less depressed. I can empathize with my users very well since I am a college student who often has trouble waking up. I will analyze the bugs I see throughout the process and adjust my project accordingly.
Plan:
- I will start my project by looking back at the process we did in the recitation about making Arduino and Processing communicate with the LEDs to understand the process thoroughly.
2. I will then sketch out the circuit I am going to make
3. construct the physical circuit and workout the Arduino and Processing code to make sure they are communicating properly
4. get a file of an alarm sound or some other sound to wake up to and upload it to the processing library and make sure the LEDs react to the processing code
5. code a wakeup sequence, and one for my snooze is hit
Context and Significance:
Preparatory research helped me develop my idea since I knew I was interested in working with LEDs, so I narrowed my research to LED-based interactive projects. I then used those other projects to influence this one in a way that solved a problem that I had. I define interaction as the exchange of actions and reactions in the art system among participants. My project is interactive because the LED light sequence activates when the alarm triggers it, reacting to a participant in the circuit. Then it responds to the action of the alarm by starting the “good morning” sequence. My project is based on the recitation we did in class, but it is unique as it is being converted to the real world to solve. A problem people struggle with, which is waking up. Subsequent projects may build upon creating a more wireless-friendly circuit. My circuit will be built using a breadboard and an Arduino, causing wires to be up around the bed area, making it a little dangerous and troublesome. As a real-world product, it would make more sense for it to be controlled via a cellphone rather than using Arduino and processing on my laptop. If it could be made into an app and have the circuit already built into the LEDs, this product would be finalized. However, I cannot do this due to time constraints and a lack of app coding knowledge. This is something to consider building on for subsequent projects.
Overall, I like the idea of my project as it addresses the real-world problem that the average human deals with, waking up. My project will wake the user up effectively in a more enjoyable way via a visually appealing “good morning” light sequence. This is a project I could see being put on the market as a real-world product, as its applications are vast.
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