Light Experimentation - Part 14: New Directions

Following this post, I have discussed with Nur, Harah and Andreas and received feedback on the kinetic light. I also had discussion with some of my classmates and participants and here are the key points:

• The kinetic light is quite noisy, so it is not suitable for sleep experience testing
• It is rather large to be placed in a bed room (We went ahead with the construction since its a pilot testing knowing that the structure is quite large, at the end after the contraption is done, we wanted to 'hide' the top part and scale down the lower part which consist of the 5 droplets so its not so 'spread' out.)
• Although red colour may be a suitable colour for sleep, it kind of reminds of the red light district so some of them suggested me to use warm white / yellow
• On a brighter side, most of them shared that the light effect is quite hypnotising

Conclusion: I agree with most of them that it is not feasible to continue working on this kinetic light as I have low confidence in improving the noise, it will require a rather long period of gear printing and testing.

Previously I have also considered a back up plan with the following 2 options:

1. A design case for the pulsing light, instead of using this globe - going back to my very first design with only the pulsing component - no more ripple effects

2. Explore the spinning of an individual resin droplet - retaining the ripple light and pulsing effects 

The 1st option is definitely the easier and safer option to work on as I'm only left with 1 week for the testing happening on 3rd March, this post is written on 26th Feb, but I've set the published date to 18th so the blog flow for Light Experimentation is not disrupted for reading. But I decided to take a risk and also experiment on 2nd option at the same time as I didn't want to give up on the ripple effects I've been working so hard for. 

Working on 1st option:

 Building a stand for the light, still at prototyping phase. For viva and exhibition, I will refine the stand and aesthetics.

 I decided to use the silicone LED for the pulsing light


As we are using the 1st Arduino for the 2nd option, we borrowed another Arduino to work on the pulsing speed for this

 Testing with cool white LED, the pulsing is still quite unstable and not smooth

Testing with warm white LED, we fixed the pulsing and the speed is correct now. I will be working on option 2 and if it fails, this 1st option will be used for the experience testing.