Inspiration
We have visually impaired family members, and would love to bring nature to them.
What it does
Bringing nature to those who can’t experience it: this photosensor plays a morning alarm tone and displays good morning when it detects light—perfect for those visually impaired/ in a windowless room.
How we built it
We used Arduino Uno board with photosensitive sensor and LCD screen as well as a breadboard and some jumper cables to build the hardware. The photosensitive sensor and the screen is connected to the Arduino board to collect series of light intensity values and output simple string on the screen. Also, it is connected to the laptop to play alarm tone with the laptop's speaker. On the software side, we used Arduino IDE to program the Arduino Uno (so it can take input from the sensor and output string on the screen depending on the value of the sensor (high intensity - "Good morning", low intensity - "Sleep tight!"). Also, java program on the Processing IDE takes part of playing tone on the laptop by intaking light intensity value into the program and play sound if the value indicates high light intensity.
Challenges we ran into
We faced two challenges. First challenge was when we kept getting error values from the sensor, but we tried our best to solve the problem with some help from mentors and managed to get stable connection to the board. Second challenge was when we tried to connect sensor to the Processing program. It returned random values at first, however, with endless trials and modification of our code, we finally made the correct series of light intensity value from the sensor read on Processing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to build a working alarm triggered by light intensity using Arduino Uno, photosensitive sensor, and LCD screen even though it's our very first hardware project using Arduino and Processing.
What we learned
We learned how to connect sensors to Arduino board to get input values and output some strings on the LCD screen. Also, we learned how to process input value from sensors on laptop.
What's next for Sunrise Photosensor Development
We can get and add a speaker module for Arduino board so it can work without laptop.
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