Ladies and gentlemen, engineers and hobbyists, welcome one and all to my first ever IoT project!
As you can probably guess, I am one of the lucky roadtesters for the Infineon RGB shield. Now this blog has been a long time coming, and I sincerely apologize for this delay, however unlike some other roadtesters this is my first ever electronics project(from home anyway) and so I was slightly unprepared. So I decided that it would be best to wait until I had pretty much everything that I needed for this project before blogging about it so that the blogs could be consistent and evenly spaced out but hey, better late than never as they say!
Now enough of the boring stuff, let's get down to business! So as you can probably see from my tag, I am going to create an interactive Christmas tree, which will be able to change it's lighting according to the mood of the room."How on earth will you find the 'mood' of a room?" I hear you cry! Well to be honest I'm not entirely sure however the plan is to use a small microphone(which will be hung from the Christmas tree itself) to listen to the sound in the room. The arduino yun will then change the colour, intensity and possibly even mode of the RGB strip according to what it hears. For example, if there is little noise the LEDs may be a dim red which will fade in and out, however if there is a lot of loud, high pitched noises the LEDs may be a bright flashing blue.
In terms of layout and setup etc., I will have the yun attached to the microphone, deciding on the mood of the room and then telling that to the uno which will control the Infineon board. Although i could possibly have this the other way round, I decided to use the yun to process the data as I also plan to possibly create an app for my phone using the android sdk which will allow me to change things like modes or intensity over wifi. My original thoughts were to connect the yun and arduino via usb, however this can produce some problems, such as the uno drawing power from the yun, and the fact that it looks extremely complicated! I will update you all on my final decision in my next blog.
Below is a picture showing all of the connections between the devices I will be using. It isn't too detailed, but it helps to show what on earth I'm rambling on about.
Join me again this time next week(hopefully) for my second blog, where i will working with the yun to turn the microphones outputs into moods and then send that to the uno.
