Light Up Ottoman Prototyping

Much of our prototyping process evolved around doing the individual elements (both physically making them and coding) and then figuring out how to put everything together.

First, we started by building a digital people counter. We were able to create a laser/photoresistor line which could tell if people entered a room. We made 2 of these, to determine if someone is leaving or entering a room. If the value of the photoresistor suddenly decreases, it means that someone is in front of it and depending on their direction, the counter will either add or subtract a number of people from the room. Our aim for this was to create a product that would only light up when 1 person is in the room. 

Here is the photoresistor setup. It works when a laser pointer is shined at it. 

Next, we figured out the capacitive sensor and how we could use that to turn on LEDs. Below is the functional diagram we used to get this working. 

When the person in the room pets the furniture, it changes color. We liked the idea of having multiple sections on the furniture which react differently to petting, and if you pet for different amounts of time, the furniture reacts differently, so we created multiple capacitive sensors and added total time to our code. It was exciting to figure out how to keep track of sensed time and change actuation based on this input! 

Next we started to actually create the physical prototype. We purchased an ottoman from Goodwill, which we planned on adding lights to and reupholstering. Most of our time during this stage was spent in the Mill soldering. Our finished product has 51 LEDs, and each light has 6 soldering joints, so we successfully soldered over 300 times! We definitely got pretty good at it by the end of the project. We bought a 100 pack of LEDs, so we have extras and both of us want to use them in the future to create some other fun product. 

We soldered all of the lights together into a long snakelike chain. As we were transporting the line around, some of the wires between the plastic and the solder joint got frayed and it would break or short circuit. This was a big problem, but we found a solution in hot glue! If we glued over the back and sides of the LEDs after we soldered them, there would be a protective layer which would prevent breakage. This worked really well, but we had a few connections that were iffy, which made the whole string of lights flicker. We ended up taking the glue off some of them and redoing the soldering. 

Next, we connected the string of lights to the actual furniture. Once the lights were attached, we began experimenting with the Neopixel code to see what patterns and colors we looked best on the ottoman. We attached the capacitive sensors and connected the different codes to the sensors so that they would elicit different reactions. The final step was to cover the furniture in fur!