We made a little desktop companion for our PoE (Principles of Engineering) final project. The goal of PoE is to create a final project that integrates electrical, mechanical, and software engineering to make something really cool out of it. Our project is inspired by Strandbeests, and does a really cool wave motion.
The LEDs on the top of the structure are individually addressable RGB LEDs. RGB LEDs each have 4 pins, one for ground, and then one for each color channel. So with 8 LEDs in total, we ended up have a protoboard dealing with the 32 pins for the LEDs. And since the Arduino UNO doesn’t have nearly enough pins to deal with what the LEDs require, we used the ShiftPWM library to allow us to write PWM signals to the analog pins and have the Arduino translate to digital signals for the LEDs.
All in all, what I’m saying is that we have pretty colors. (There’s also a photodiode on the front that allows us to “wake up” the sculpture with light.)
The accelerometer detects sudden motions on the face of the sculpture, which results in cute reactions like this:
Awwwwww :3
Our website is here. Featuring lots more pictures and text.
-Sophie
P.S: I could literally watch our little guy wave for days.
