Chakra Vase

februar 05, 2018

Chakra Vase

: light your fire

Photoshop mockup with three leds

I want to create this light object from a vase using a neopixel strip with 7 leds. Each light will symbolize one of the seven chakras. If I am able to, I would like to gather data through a questionnare where the answers would change the brightness of each light.

So far I have made a mockup with three leds, since the strip of seven leds would not light up. I will probably have to desolder and solder it again, and hope to make it work. I still included all seven leds in my line of code, and used the shorter strip to test the colours. I found and used code from learn.adafruit.com, and found that very helpful. Some of the sketches from class became confusing as to which line of code actually served the function i needed. I can only hope my understanding will increase exponentially to my learning curve.

The object I want to light up is a triangular glass vase, and it has a red coloured glass in the bottom. I thought too late of actually finding a use for the water proof led strip, but then I had already started cutting into it. It would be interesting to see how the water would change the light. The glass does break the light in an interresting way, and I just hope the leds are bright enough to make an effect on a white wall in a dark room. I am not too sure where to put it, but I would love to place it in a corner.

I had this idea that I wanted the lights to shine according to peoples answers to a questionnare. It could be done by placing an iPad and connect it to the object. If I could find a good way of collecting arduino compatible data from a questionnare on an iPad in a week, I most definitely will do that. But it will require som research and extra work going into the questionnare too. I know which one it would be, and it is probably not hard to translate the numbers into brightness. Here are my thoughts on the equation for that matter.

20 questions are answered by marking one or more of the answers
All answers are numbered 1-7, matching the chakras 1-7, and also the lights 1-7 (or actually 0-6)

Since there are 20 questions you can choose each number up to 20 times.

So led #1 will have a 100% brightness if you have marked 1 in all of the questions.

I have to figure out:

How to make the questionnare arduino-friendly
How to display the object with a user-interface like an iPad (or something else available that works)
Drawing people in - i think the light itself will do that. I will program it to stay lit until the next starts taking the questionnare. It will reset when someone else starts taking the test

Should the leds light up a little at a time throughout the questionnare? This might be a continuous positive incentive to keep going
Or should it be a mystery that you will not figure out until you have finished the test ( will the slight differences in brightness even be visible to the naked eye? If not, option one will better communicate which chakras are more dominant)

Communicating the interaction and the connection between the tablet and the object (cause-and-effect-indicator/signage)
How to make people go through the whole questionnare of 20 questions...
Where to place it
And how to fix my led-strip