Summary of Arduino controlled Interactive wallpiece
This project features an interactive touch-activated light display controlled by an Arduino UNO. Utilizing capacitive touch sensing through Arduino pins, touching specific metal parts triggers LEDs to light up. The example includes a "Robo" design made from metallic sheets where touching the face or shield activates corresponding LEDs. The capacitive sensing measures the pin discharge time, which varies when touched, requiring threshold calibration. Outputs and inputs are mapped to specific Arduino pins for sensor and LED control, creating an intuitive interactive wall-piece.
Parts used in the interactive wall-piece:
- Arduino UNO board
- Thin metallic sheets (silver colored)
- Thin metal wires
- Blue LEDs (for eyes)
- Connecting wires
This project is a subset of my idea of an interactive wall.. so this is an interactive wall-piece..
What does it do ? Mine is a touch activated light display.
How does it work? It is controlled by an Arduino UNO which senses the inputs and turns on the respective outputs.
Step 1: Building the touch sensor
If u have an Arduino board, building a touch sensor is a cakewalk..
U dont need ny external hardware to get the sensing functionality.
All u need to do is upload the following code on ur board, turn on ur serial monitor and then touch the metallic wire to see the change in the value. 🙂
What does the code do? It returns the time that the pin takes to discharge. When it is touched, it takes more time to discharge. U need to adjust the threshold to currectly identify a touch.
Even If u cant understand the function which calculates the value of the pin, it is perfectly ok.. There are only 2 modifications needed according to ur design.
1) The number of touch sensing u want
2) Threshold setting
Here’s a lil shaky video about how u can see the difference in the capacitance value of a pin when u touch it. <my camera wasn able to focus well so>
Lemme explain what happens in the video. When the pin is not touched, I get the value 1 at the pin [as can b seen on the serial monitor]. When the pin is touched, the value goes higher than one, depending on how much u press the wire. Again when released, the pin value goes back to one.
Once the sensing goes well, we build the whole contraption!
capacitive_touch.inoStep 2: Build the design
We shall first see the simpler one, which is the steel colored Robo.
Function : Touch anywhere on the face and the eyes glow.
Touch anywhere on its shield and see the ‘A’ glow.
For building the Robo, I used thin metallic sheets of silver color.
The connections are simple. Just connect a thin metal wire from the sensor areas [2 in this case: face and shield] to any of Arduino digital pins 8 to 12. [They say even 13 works but my trials found it wasnt as reliable as other pins]
Connect the 2 blue LEDs together [for the eyes] and connect the ground to the common Arduino Ground and the Positive supply wire to other Arduino digital pins [3 through 7 were the pins where I connected the outputs and 8 through 12 were the input pins]
Sorry got no pics of the robo while it was built..
Now we go through the building of the flower piece contraption. Its a lil tricky!
For more detail: Arduino controlled Interactive wallpiece
