Today was the first day of using adafruit and a CPX board to make different gadgets with different outputs, and we learned something different everyday. Each day consist of a brief in the morning at 9 am, and a show and tell of what everyone has done at 3 pm. Few rules, endless possibilities!
Since today was the first day, the only task was to make your CPX board glow somehow. Many people incorporated sound, which I didn’t, but instead I incorporated some small LED lightbulbs. To do this, I had to connect my CPX board to a connection board, and make a full coupling from the CPX board, which led power through my computer and also held the different commands. In addition to electricity I also had to connect the additional board to the ground and I had to connect the action (of turning on the lightbulb) itself. Once I had understud how to do this, I started thinking of what I wanted to make.
Since we had about five hours a day to make a concept, I went with the ‘first and best’ principal for this day as well as the other days, and what quickly came to mind was: Make a halloweenlamp. The two LED lights were gonna be the eyes, and then I just had to make a construction to hold all the wires and co., and cover it all with something. And for covering it I think I speak for all of us when I say: It’s obvious, make a ghost! Covering with just a white sheet is super easy - and since we made such small gadgets, this could be achieved through simply using paper towels!
So, I made the construction on the inside using two paper bowls, a cup, a string, and a lot of superglue. I draped the whole thing with paper towels, which gave easy access to the CPX board and the other wires and such, if I needed to adjust something. Since this was a halloweenlamp, I adjusted the light switch to make the eyes glow when there is no light in the room, and switching the eyes off when there is light. This way, if it were a real lamp hanging on someones porch, it would automatically turn on when the sun went down, and get turnet off then the sun rises again. Here is my final product: