For my ambient readings, I put together a simple photoresistor setup that read light intensity data. I took it to different parts of my home during different times of the day to get a sense of what the numbers were typically looking like and I found that in a dark room, it displayed a value of 1020 and in direct(ish) sunlight, showed a value of 275. Through this experimentation, it inspired me to just look at the change of light intensity during sunrise and sunset. I set up my tech on my bedroom floor, in sight of my skylight so that it could catch the sun rays as it begun to peek through in the morning.
My result was two data sets, where on each row there was a light intensity value gathered for each minute. One data set was of morning data that spanned from 5:30 am to 7am and the other was evening data that spanned from 6:30pm to 8pm. This allowed me to encapsulate enough data variation to illustrate the light change. Initially, I started my data gathering at the reported sunrise time (6:23am) and realized after the data collection that I didn’t get as wide as a variation as I was expecting so I tried again with this time span which worked.
As I looked through my data, I thought it seemed like such a sterilization of the experience of sunrise and sunset. There were colors, sounds, temperatures, energy that are associated with these times that were stripped away. To return some of this back in my visualization looking at these values over time, I created this sketch in p5.js that shows the change of data along with the time and a visual representation of the sunrise and sunset. To toggle between the time of data, click “T”.
