Arduino Project ----- SNOWY

SnowyCode.zip

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Colours provoke emotions(colour-emotion). SNOWY is a digital pet for the designers to test out whether his/her anticipation of the emotions aroused by colour effects are confirmed by the users. SNOWY bridges the interaction between user and designer’ colour-emotions. The essay refers to the emotions aroused by colour as colour-emotions. The colour effects refer to the different light/colour effects that can be coded into SNOWY such as the changing of light-colours or brightness, or the fluttering of lights and so on. SNOWY Our project, named SNOWY is a personification of a lamp by means of changing the colour and brightness of the light. It explores what kind of emotion/personality is conveyed to the viewer. According to our research of colour and emotion, one colour could evoke different feelings to different people. Red/orange could both evoke excitement and anger. Yellow could mean happiness or "alert, stop" sign. Pink could mean love or shyness. Different viewers may understand SNOWY's personality differently. Breathing When the user enters the bedroom during the day, SNOWY breathes with white light. During the night, it breathes/sleeps with blue light. By changing the brightness of lights gradually and forming a cycle of “off to on, on to off”, the invisible action of breathing is given a physicality. Approaching and Holding hands If the user approaches it, it turns yellow, if the user holds its hands, it turns pink gradually and then flutters with a reddish colour. After three times, it shuts down for a while. As designers, we have designed a personality for SNOWY with our understanding of the colour-emotions with reference to our research: Snowy is happy (yellow)when one approaches it, when someone holds its hands, it feels love(pink) and then dance with excitement(fluttering). After it dances for three times, it becomes tired and wants to rest. We have anticipated that the personality might be understood by the viewers differently. Indeed, there is also another reaction from the viewer: snowy is alerted when one approaches it, when someone touches it, it feels shy and then is angry that it is touched. After it is mad for three times, it feels too angry to keep lighting up. Gifting and Dreaming When the user gives a snowflake to SNOWY during the day, SNOWY will turn pink, which is to indicate that SNOWY is happy/infused with love when receiving a gift. Only when SNOWY is given a gift during the day, will it have a dreaming state during the night, otherwise it will only breathe/sleep. The dreaming state is a mixture of rainbow colours which flow and change smoothly. Hardware & Software Along with Arduino, we utilized NeoPixel to perform the change of colour display, a distance sensor to sense the user's approach, and an LDR to distinguish between day and night. The hands of SNOWY are made of two metal wires to sense the resistance, through potential divider we are able to identify certain data range on the serial monitor, so it is able to realize the effect of holding hands(data range 400 to 1000)/giving a gift which wraps a resistor (data >1000). NeoPixel library is used in the code. We added a "counter" value to record the fluttering status of SNOWY so that it is possible to shut it down after 3 records. The same goes for the dreaming effect. We added “counter2” to record that it is given a gift in the day.