Feasability Prototype

We have just finished our feasability protoype, and I am excited to keep working to complete our project. Our goal for the prototype was to find a way to sync music to lights, and to create a soft circuit. 

We found a tutorial on Instructables that gave us a way to sync music played by the computer to lights connected to an Arduino. While the tutorial seemed simple at first, it was difficult to begin to understand how to use Arduinos and Processing, which is an environment for programming Arduinos. Eventually we were able to complete the tutorial, resulting in three LEDs on a breadboard that light up to the beat of the music.

 

The next step was to understand how to build a soft circuit. Originally, we planned on using the LilyPad Arduino, which is a light weight Arduino that is good for soft circuits. However, we realized quite late that we were missing the part that connects the LilyPad to the computer. So we decided to use the Arduino Uno for our prototype. We will order the part for the LilyPad so that we can use it in the next phase of our project. Creating a soft circuit was quite simple. We just had to sew lines from the positive and negative sides of our LEDs to connect them to our Arduino.

Finally we added another LED to our circuit to test how it would work with more than just three LEDs. While the fourth LED blinks at the same time as another one of the LEDs, it makes more of a visual impact to have more lights.

I am optimistic about the next phase of out project, and excited to see how it turns out.