The ConceptMake a fun, partly interactive, proactive, and informative mirror for the bathroom that will decrease the isolation of every day information without interfering with the privacy a bathroom usually offers.
The idea is to introduce information in the bathroom environment where you usually do not have access to that much information even though it can be badly needed, especially in the mornings. The information is presented through the mirror since it is an object that exist in most bathrooms and is a nice surface for displaying information. Interactions with the mirror can be done by shading the buttons, sweeping your hand in front of the buttons lighting up behind mirror will switch the information and display the next feature. The Features- Clock
- Toothbrush Timer
- Outdoor Temperature
- Switching Information
- Weather
- Mirror automatically turns off in the dark
These are the feature implemented for the mirror. Of course the LED matrices could be used for displaying other information. The Realization
In several steps the mirror was created, one feature at a time was prototyped and different solutions were tested.
Prototype 1 - Lighting up
The
first prototype was to test if the lighted LED would show behind
the mirror which it does quite nicely (despite of the flash).
Prototype 2 & 3 - Interactive
Our
second and third prototype of the HUD mirror was about making it interactive. The
first attempt to interact with the mirror was to control the LED with a LDR
behind the mirror, which worked nicely but if several LDR's were to be used they needed to be synchronized to be equally sensitive and give relevant readings. The second attempt was with
a clap sensor. It worked but would react to any sound above a certain
amount of decibels, not just claps.
Prototype 4 - Driving the Matrix
The fourth prototype was to make the information display. This was done with four 8x8 LED matrices together with
the MAX7219 driver and it was controlled with an Arduino board.
Prototype 5 - Wrapping it up
The last iteration consisted of integrating the previous prototypes and making it all come together.
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