For this design, I first thought of a famous story to tackle. Which is more fitting than the infamous tragedy of the two forbidden lovers? Romeo and Juliet simply want to be together, but if either of their families catch them it’s over.
My project sybolizes this using three servos, and an h bridge controlling a set of LED’s. I had to use servos instead of dc motors, because understanding position was key. The audience controls Romeo and juliet, and tries to avoid a patrolling guard. If the guard sees them together, he splits them apart and the two must go back home.
Project files here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_rqoxuDYou6Vks0dGhQNWw5YXM/view?usp=sharing
I had a lot of trouble with this project. First of all, I really liked my idea for a story portrayal, but was unsure of how to work an hbridge into it. I sifted through several ideas and finally decided on a very straightforward was of using it to control LED states. The biggest trouble came with testing the servos, two of them turned out to be broken, and much of my time was wasted troubleshooting why they were not working. I was then attempting to run three servos off of arduino power, which I read online was possible, and it was just causing the weirdest malfunctions. Sometimes they would just move randomly, and only rarely would it short the board, which finally tipped me off to the problem after hours of messing around with controls. I had originally wanted to use rotary potentiometers to change the position of romeo and juliet, but I switched them out because I thought that they were potentially causing the problem. If I had the project to do over again, I would put them back in, and add some buzzers or a haptic feedback device to simulate getting caught more than just the LEDs. I would also put more time into the creation and craft of the system, likely laser cutting custom parts instead of using found materials.