What it does
It has five lighting modes, each one determined by how many fingers the user holds up. For the first animation, the Leap Motion controller reads the position of the user's open hand and lights up the corresponding LED column when the hand is moved left and right. For the other four animations, the Leap Motion controller looks at how many fingers the user is holding up and plays one of four lighting animations.
How we built it
We built a simple LED circuit on a breadboard and connected it to our Arduino Uno. We used the Leap Motion API with two IDEs: Processing and Arduino. Processing was used to send serial data to the Arduino, which took the data and turned the LEDs on and off as desired.
Challenges we ran into
At first, we tried to use Node.js to control the Arduino, but the connection was unreliable. Our animations also kept looping for a while instead of playing once, so we solved that by resetting the Arduino after every animation.
What we learned
How to use the Leap Motion API and how to use Processing in conjuction with Arduino to create a real-time embedded system.
What's next for Motion Controlled Lighting Using Leap Motion
Expanding the size of the LED matrix so we'll be able to draw shapes and play more complex animations.
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