by Michelle Pan
My piece light mixer is a device that allows a user to control the color of an LED light through buttons and a photoresistor. There are two modes, one is a “manual mode” where the color of the LED can be adjusted by pressing the red, green, and blue buttons to control the R, G, and B values, respectively. The other mode is a “fade mode”, where the LED will gradually transition between different colors when the photoresistor is covered.
This mode allows the color of the LED to be controlled through button presses. Each press increases the intensity of the red, green, or blue colors, and once the value reaches the upper end of its range, it loops back around to zero.
I added this mode because I wanted the device to be a bit more dynamic, and I think it’s a nice contrast to the fine-grained control of the manual mode. When the photoresistor is covered, the LED fades between colors, and the pattern of this fade is determined by pre-set rates at which each of the RGB values changes.
inspiration: my “light mixing” idea was inspired by how i loved mixing paints back when i took art classes, and the wonder of experimenting with how colors combined together. more recently, i’ve seen websites like the one above where you can digitally combine colors together.
inspiration: i’ve never owned a Philips Hue light, but i always see them around and love the vibrance they add to the ambiance of any room. i borrowed the concept of having an interface to control light color from this product!
ideation: this is a sketch of the project that i added to throughout building it—here i show the two modes through which the LED can be controlled, and the components involved in each
building part 1: this was the first stage of my build process, where i added two additional buttons to the setup from the LED Arduino tutorial, and used them to add to the RGB values of the LED color.
building part 2: i added colored caps onto the buttons to make it more clear which values they correspond to.
building part 3: finally, i added analog input from the photoresistor!
I’m pretty happy with how this piece turned out! I think it’d be interesting to expand upon it by using different interface elements to control the colors. I would love to perhaps create something that mimics a color wheel, or just use anything that provides more of a feeling of continuity.
After creating this piece and seeing what others made during our critique in class, I was impressed by how much you can do with just a few lights. In the future, I’m hoping to push my creativity more and think about how to use parts in ways they weren’t necessary intended for.
Because this didn’t take a long time to build, I’m planning to repurpose the parts for my next project :)
Github link to Arduino code
Google Drive link to video