Project Proposal October 28th, 2016

Possible Project Titles:  Rain dance / Walk on the clouds / cloud control / cloud no. 9

Project Participants:  Al Scheuring, Noreen Saeed & Sina Siddiqi
Project Proposal:
The main idea of the project is to have a few *clouds in the sky, which respond to users walking or jumping on certain spots underneath it. So essentially, two components are to be designed:
1. The clouds themselves, and the behavior they manifest by way of lights turning on or flickering, sounds of thunder, and a gentle shaking motion.
2. The pressure sensitive floor boards which trigger the response in the clouds. The flooring is to have symbols and lines which would indicate the relationship of the floor and clouds to the users.
Our purpose is to play upon a child’s curiosity to explore and engage them to try to walk over to different symbols and see what sort of response each could trigger. So we would have a different response from the cloud if two symbols are triggered simultaneously. Certain behaviors would trigger a *reward from the clouds by performing extra vigorous movement, or simultaneous response from all the clouds at once.
The fabrication of the clouds would involve laser cutting some cardboard to a suitable shape, which would then be covered with fluff. We would fit lights inside, as well as a tiny speaker. A small motor would cause the cloud to shake gently. We plan to have a total of six clouds, and the entire installation to take up a space of 10’ x 8’.
We are still exploring the pressure sensitive trigger mechanism for the floor. One effective method that are considering to use is described  here . This method involves a metal plate which acts as a giant switch. Another plate with bolts sits on top of this plate. The circuit is completed when someone steps on these causing the bolts of the top plate to come in contact with the plate underneath. Please see the attached sketch for details.

We would require an Arduino Mega for the project to handle the 24 to 36 different connections we might end up needing.
We drew inspiration of this idea from an online source by Richard Clarkson which can be found at:  http://www.richardclarkson.com/cloud/

Reference for the vertical motion of clouds came from the work of the artist Laurent Debraux which can be found here .
We intend to use this mechanism to get the clouds to exhibit an up and down motion.

Execution: For the first checkpoint we intend to have completed the fabrication of two of the clouds and two switchplates. Because this will be the first iteration, we might modify the designs at a later stage. The lights may not be one hundred percent programmed, but would contain the basic idea. Al will be the team manager, and coordinate all the tasks. He is to have a major contribution in getting the switch plates to work. Noreen to help with any CAD drawings, and assist in the coding. Sina to work on the general fabrication as well as coding work.