The Rude Lamp

My concept is to do a lamp that can warn you when you are too close to a book when reading. I used an ultrasonic sensor to detect the distance and a red light will be lighten up to warn you to sit straight. Meanwhile, I also connected it to processing so there will be a gif and an audio played to also remind you about your pose.

I struggled a big about connecting a circuit without breadboard according to the restriction of the assignment. I did a small prototype to test if I can make it work.

After this I then drew a whole circuit diagram and soldered leds with resistors. The circuit part succeeded.

Initially I really wanted to do a wood lamp. Yet my first try in laser lab failed due to the wood board was too thick and I wasted 2 hours in the lab with the cutter that refused to cut through the board. The making center store also ran out of thinner boards.

Eventually I decided to go with acrylic. Yet again, the laser cutter treated me badly and the board got burnt. The burnt black marks were very obvious so I put a black layer of paper inside the box to cover those stains.

To me the part in processing was especially difficult. First of all, importing a gif into processing was not easy. There has to be a specific library and certain code. It also took me a very long time to link processing with arduino. Finally when it works, the audio file was echoing when it played. Then I figured out that there has to be a delay between the time of the gif played and the audio played. Although the effect is not as good after adding the delay, I am very happy with the result.

The shape of this lamp can be improved so people can feel more comfortable when reading the book and that the brightness can be improved by replacing the LEDs into more powerful ones and the red one can be changed to a brighter one.