Controlling Lights 2

So continuing where I left off before, I've continued to add functionality to the device that I've been working on. I mentioned before I've been working with a friend of mine who's a grad CE student, and with his help I've made some pretty big strides. Here's a picture of the two sensors that I'm currently working with for this device.

This first one is the sound-based distance sensor, which has a reported range of 2mm to 500mm. It seems to work quite well at detecting distances, but was pretty tricky to get to that point because of a lot of false detection values it can put out which need to be sorted out. (In other words, it would give a few values saying nothing in the way there in the middle of a bunch of values saying something was in the way of it.)


The second one is a microphone sensor which detects sound. It's really pretty touchy, and doesn't work too well ad detecting quieter sounds like talking, but works well in detecting louder sounds like shouting or clapping. I can try fiddling with this more, but I think that it's really just because it's a cheap sensor.


At this point I have my setup controlling 40 LEDs, which I can control all of independently. I stopped at 40 independent LED's currently because that's the maximum for some hardware that I bought which let's me do that. They're called shift registers and look like this:


I can very easily scale up the number of independently controlled LED's though, by buying another pack of 5 of these guys. (1 shift register = 8 LED's controlled, so 5 shift registers = 40 LED's)

These are also independently controlled ones, so if I wanted several turning off or on at the same time, they could all be grouped and controlled together. So essentially at this point, I'm not entirely sure I need to be able to control more independently? I guess it would highly depend on what exactly I was doing with these, but I can scale up easily if I need to.

Getting down to the guts of things here though, currently I can have is so based on how close one gets to the distance sensor with that half a meter range I mentioned, I can drive LED's to do different things. I can also have them do different other things based on if they hear a sound through the sound sensor (currently it'd need to be a loud sound.) Adding something like switches for someone to interact with would also be trivial at this point as well. I can scale up anything that I'm doing also, besides the LED's. For instance, I can add up to ~9 more distance sensors if I wanted to with my current setup.

I thought about maybe adding some other sensors, like an accelerometer which would measure movement, or a light sensor which would measure light, but I think I don't really need to currently? If I have a specific idea that might use those I can explore those directions pretty easily at this point.

Really at this point I feel that I should move more into the direction of trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with all of this capability that I've developed here. I guess if you guys have actually read this far down in the post, you're probably decently interested in what I'm doing, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on what your thoughts are on how I could use these tools that I've been developing.

If you guys would like, I can also append some more pictures or videos of my current setup as an edit to this post, or a new post or something; whichever.

Thanks for reading!