Above you can see the current shiftr connections. All connected Arduinos, the webpage for remote controlling and the topics (currently two: lamp and ventilator).
Tag: arduino
Arduino Shield for Dimming Light
After having assembled the electronics on a breadboard I decided to solder a shield for my Arduino Yun. The power supply delivers 5V which is exactly the power the arduino needs to run. That’s why I could feed power into the Vin pin. In the end I only need to plug it in, it will connect to the internet and receive incoming messages from shiftr.io.
Video Documentation: Dimmable Lamp
Video Documentation: High Power LED dimming via Web from Jones Merc on Vimeo.
Using shiftr.io, an Arduino Yun and any sort of publishing device to shiftr (in this case a webpage publishes commands to increase or decrease LED brightness) allows me to control a lamp. This means I can also use gestures to trigger the publishing of those commands.
Controlling an LED via Arduino’s PWM
This schematic shows a setup to control (dim) an LED via Arduino. An external power supply is controlled with a transistor, which is dependent on the input of the arduino. Pulse width modulation (PWM) allows to downregulate the voltage of the power supply to the voltage required by the LED.
I need this to dim the lamp via gestures. I will therefore map a certain value (e.g. Y-axis value) to the brightness of the LED.
Video Documentation: User Tests
Video Documentation: User Tests from Jones Merc on Vimeo.
User tests showed that users direct their gestures mostly towards the object, they want to control. A direct dialogue between the user and the object is obvious.
It also showed some interesting insights about how they interact with the gesture lamp. All of them found one of the On/Off gestures pretty quickly, but were puzzled if they came across the other which rather confused them instead of helping them.
Another interesting thing said, was that if a user is controlling sound, the source is less evident than a light (lamp) or a wind (fan) source. Sound/Music is rather surrounding us and therefore a gesture may not be directed that clearly to the object (music-player) itself.
The tests sure make me rethink some interaction steps and help to develop a smoother interaction flow.
First gesture lamp prototype
Video Documentation: Gesture Lamp Prototype 1 from Jones Merc on Vimeo.
By connecting a relay with the internet (shiftr.io, Arduino Yun) I am able to control a lamp via gestures using a Leap Motion to detect movements. This prototype can now serve for further user testing to see how people will interact and if they discover the control-gestures by themselves.
Relay connected to the web
To build a lamp prototype which is controllable via gestures I built a relay attached to a normal extension cable. It can connect to the internet and by using Shiftr.io I can send commands from different sources.
Next step will be to use my Leap Motion to send those commands.