“Halloween Stay Away Machine”
My previous research for the group project had not much of an impact on my midterm project since we had to create the midterm project, and the group one was just a proposal for a futuristic object. For our midterm project, the idea at the beginning was to create lights, that when close enough they turn red and when far enough they are green. We also planned to add fans to turn on faster when close and turn off when far. This idea seemed quite simple, and we found out during the user testing and feedback before the actual presentation. We got a lot of feedback to complicate our project and have it produce or evoke emotion, instead of its simplistic current state. This was really helpful, especially with suggestions of what it could do. We took the idea to create a surprise when the user got close enough, so we went with the scary clown.
We wanted users to have a sort of rebellious decision to come closer to the “Stay Away Machine”, and once close enough they would be punished. We did this by adding a green light, which lured the user close enough. We even created a sign that said stay away (with digital fabrication), knowing that users would come close. For the clown that popped up, we wanted to use something not too gory, or something that would not produce a nightmare for the users. The core component of our project was using the infrared distance sensor. This addition allowed us to track distance, print it on the serial monitor, and have the clown turn up and the lights turn red when close enough to the machine. We wanted this project to be like the jack-in-the-box or sudden scare surprise, so we used distance to automate the clown popping up or going down. We really tried to think of a way for the clown to go up and down and not have to turn around with the servo, but we could not think of a way to produce that effect.
Here are pictures of just the lights:
Here is the code for just the lights:
Thinking of the idea was not too hard, we combined our ideas and agreed off a project design for the midterm at a really fast pace. However, getting the code was quite time-consuming. Since we had to use conditionals to control the speaker, the servo, and the LED; we struggled with the code a bit. Especially since we spent 20 minutes trying to find what was wrong until an LA told us we were missing a curly bracket at the end of the conditional. This is essential, as we did not really double-check everything and the smallest mistake created such a hassle for us. On the day of the presentation, the machine was not working properly, as there seemed to be a delay for to clown to pop up once close enough to the machine. It was all working the day before with the same voltage and power connections, but it just stopped working the next day. Eric described that this should be a problem with power usage since the speaker requires quite a bit of power. This should have been the problem, so we should have added another 7.5V power adapter. Even though this already happened, we learned this lesson and will apply it to the future. We also tried incorporating a scary tune to the buzzer, but we couldn’t find the chords for one to google so I just tried putting in A-minor, C, E, A-minor, etc..
Here is the final version working:
The goal of the “Halloween Stay Away Machine” is to create a clown that pops up and evokes a surprising emotion for the user. It interacts by having the clown appear when close enough, and the clown goes down when far away. We tried to use the risky behavior of people, to get close when it says to stay away, and create a surprise to sort of punish that riskiness. It is sort of like the scary movies when the character still goes downstairs, when everything seems wrong, and finds out there is paranormal activity down there. The audience did exactly that and kept walking up and trying out the project (although there was a delay problem on presentation day). We learned a lot from this project. From checking the smallest errors to using our creativity and creating a machine out of our ideas, it was a really interesting experience.