• Project: 🌤️ or 🌧️
For this assignment, we integrated linear motion with weather, mainly using the LED strip as the light source.
We attached the strip to the edges of the rounded semi-transparent acrylic boards as the sun and used the reflection of a bottle with light shining towards its bottom as the rain. For a better visual effect and also to hide the actuators by the way, we laser cut a semi-transparent cloud-shape acrylic board and glued the cotton on it for soft and large-scale light. When the sun rises, the light shines through the cloud.
We taped the two actuators in opposite directions behind the big acrylic board. The linear actuators started to move from the position where it was, so we needed to shorten both at the beginning to set its initial position. The sun and rain do the same up-and-down motion with the corresponding LEDs lit up asynchronously.
– When the sun rises, there is no rain. When the sun sets, it rains.
After the presentation, we got the advice that the motion could be accomplished by only one actuator and we didn’t need two. To make full use of two actuators, we can add only the cloud or sunny rain to the weather representation for future improvement.
- Documentation Video
(Closer View)