Time flies and the second HomeSense meeting with Théo and David was up. The objective was to finish our project I called ‘Light manipulator’ and imagine the project we will work on at the session no. 3.

With no time to waste we started with a “small” brainstorming about different project propositions I prepared during the week. Ideas varied from artistic installation, intelligent ‘creatures’ that would make my life easier (or not) to hacking iPhone applications.

After putting together a list of 6-7 potential projects we opened a discussion about their feasibility, technical issues, added value, time, costs… It was impressive to see how the guys have intentionally applied some difficulties to the projects just to get sufficiently challenged. Two thumbs up! But the hard part was about to come; how do we choose only one project, when we would like you like all of them?

For Théo and David things were clear – we need a simple algorithm based on a few variables as time, difficulty, cost, kit exploitation, interests etc. and it will choose/calculate the winner for us. Fair enough. 
And the winner was the noise detector that will make the life of my neighbor downstairs slightly more bearable. :)

Happy about our final decision, we moved into the corridor in order to install my so wanted “light manipulator”. The octopus build from Arduino, light sensor, buzzer and tilt switch seemed eager to get useful. With a few code hacks, impressive installation using sewing thread and some duct tape, the ‘manipulator’ got fully operational in no time.

And here is a little video showing how we did it:

Homesense Light Manipulator from Homesense London1 on Vimeo.

Till next time… greetings from Geneva!

-Darja