The hard part for some.

So whilst in New York City! With the IDAT crew, jon was busy at home hacking away.(My heart goes out to you)

We now had a way to detect the traffic light turning red via arduino. However a problem had reared its ugly head.

The Problem

 Because we are now using arduino we had to find a way to communicate with the projector.

Option A. Have a wired connection. Option B. Have a wireless connection.

Option A is clearly going to require wires leading over the road and to be honest looks untidy and its very easy to see for any member of the public how its working, what a bore!

Option B presents a challenge of wirelessly communicating the Light sensor on the arduino board with the projector! 

Well we do like a challenge us IDAT lot.

So using arduino parts its easy enough to communicate wirelessly, however the parts reach up to £50 in price and well we are students! So we found out how to use a method that was cheap and provided wireless technology.

A fart machine!?

 Yes a fart machine. Via a very simpel form of toy hacking we can use a £10 fart machine in our project for more examples of it visit ‘tinker.it’ . So Jon did a sterling job of hacking a simple toy fart machine so that instead of having a button to activate the sound, a light sensor would replace it. Yet it still worked in the same way, the wireless connection between the remote was the same but now a light sensor activated the sound as opposed to a button. I think we may have discovered cheap wireless! We would then use the sound made to set off the projection. Basically Traffic light > light sensor > fart machine > sound sensor > computer > projector.

 

 And here's a video to show it working....

So a little change, the fart machines newly hacked remote would sit inside the traffic light so that when the light comes on, it will set the fart machine off wirelessly and now the ardunio board will sense the sound and when it does it will communicate with our flash animation.