Mapping: Your Personal, Portable Therapist

For the mapping assignment, I focused on the questions: "Can we express a mood with a single pixel?" and "How can I incorporate a buzzer into this?"

How could I use the analog controls to express mood, and which controls would correlate with different emotions? Why would these correlations exist?

The thought of where to include a buzzer almost immediately made me think of a therapy session. The therapist (RGB LED) would show an emotional response via color to your actions as a patient (expressed via analog controls). Originally, I wanted to have it so that the buzzer would go off after a short time, ideally cutting the therapy interaction off in a surprising moment to (hopefully humorously) convey the idea that even though you may be making emotional progress and communicating well, it will end at a set time regardless of the actual experience of the session.

Here's a sketch of the idea:

I focused on the assignment requirements, so I wasn't able to spend too much time trying to figure out how to have a timer run in the background to trigger the buzzer while the code for interaction runs without delay. However, I did incorporate the buzzer idea in a different way - if you "cry" too much (measured by the water detection) the session will end.

Here's the schematic and images of the setup:

Schematic

All the things

Wires on a breadboard

I do sometimes have a problem where the sound sensor code is trigger by the water sensor (and not because of the buzzer going off). It seems like the kind of issue that would be resolved with a decoupling capacitor as described in the readings. However, from the PDF paired with the kit, I believe there should be a capacitor in the sound sensor already. I did try adding one but it caused more problems so I took it out.

At the end, this was the result:

Code below:


Yours truly,
Toupee4