Final design:
15 etched acrylic panels with box that will hold all the panels in place.
After our design has been finalized we started to build our final piece.
Etched 15 acrylic panels
Pattern inspired by signal like symbols/dots
135 neopixels
9 neopixel / 1 acrylic panel
Soldering the neopixels was very challenging, we spent a lot of time trying to solder all of them together. We also had to make sure that the data wire flows in the right direction.
Pressure sensors and neopixel testing with code
We wrote our code based on Adafruit Neopixels examples code.
HOW IT WORKS:
Our piece is a 2 person experience
One person on one side.User 1 controls 7 panels of that side. (panel 1-7) User 2 controls the other 7 panels of the other side. (panel 9-15)Both of the users control the middle panel together. (panel 8)The harder the user press on the pressure sensor, the more panels light up. Starting from the one closest to the user.If both of the user press hard enough, 8th panel (the middle one) will light up. Which mean that both of them help light up all of the panels and that their connection is completed.
User testing
Suggestion from users:
Make the celebration that the users complete the connection more distinct, they couldn’t tell that they have achieved the final stage of the project. They suggested that maybe we could make all of them light up and blink or do a color cycle that look special and more celebrating.They also suggested that we can make buttons that have the same patterns as our acrylic panels to give hint to the users that these buttons have something to do with the panels.
*our neopixels were blinking and we didn’t know why they were doing that. We had enough power supply with enough amps. We thought it was something to do with the code, but after talking to Tom about it he found out that we had a loose connection in one of our wires, we fixed that and neopixels were working fine and stopped blinking.
Here is the buttons that we made for our final piece.