The first week’s assignment for Light and Interactivity was to experiment with different types of LED fades. The technical output was “create an uninterruptible fade. With these constraints I found an adequate box in the junk shelf, glued on some googley-eyes, and created ‘LightBot, the anxious robot’.
Lightbot has a pleasant slow blue breathing when it’s asleep, a healthy green heartbeat when he’s awake, and a panicked ‘HELP ME’ fade when it’s upset. Lightbot gets upset when it’s turned upside down…
I spent a bit of time experimenting with different fades on an Arduino Uno. I settled on a fast sinewave for ‘happy’, a slow sinewave for ‘asleep’ and two quick pulses followed by a pause for ‘panicked’.
Once I’d found the right fades I used the Uno as a bootloader to load the sketch onto a ATTiny85 so I could fit all the electricals inside the body of LightBot. I followed this guide to set up the tiny.
