Secret Light

"Secret Light" is an experimentation with soft sensors and circuits.

The visual represents a make, composed of several dots and lines: only by pressing at the same time the right 3 dots on the right line the light will light up, like a combination lock whose password is secret.

The whole project is composed by a copper fabric circuit, a soft touch sensor, an led stick and an Arduino Uno.

The first step consisted in planning the visual maze base on which the circuit is then shaped.

Once the layout is set, I planned the path of the circuit and the position and shape of the touch sensor, based on the "lock combination" position I chose. I soldered the edges of the copper fabric paths for more stable connections. At last I added a layer of Velostat on the sensor position, between the 2 layers of copper, one on the top printed layer, one one the back foam board.

I first linked the Adafruit NeoPixel Library to my sketch to control the led Stick.

Then I check that the sensor was properly read by the Arduino by initialising the console read.

I create two functions:

displayOff: controls the state of the light by linking its brightness to the sensor value.

displayOn: keeps the light on at all time until pressure happens again. A new variable is created (newSensorValue) to detect whether the pressure sensor is activated again. In that case the light switches off and the state become false.

In the loop function I execute displayOff of displayOn based on the values received by the console: if the value higher then 30, displayOn is executed. else DisplayOff.