Well, we finished up all 10 of our LED boards, arranged them around the acrylic, and…still nothing.
We’re still not successfully observing an FTIR effect with our setup. That means, basically, the IR light isn’t getting reflected off of the fingers of the users down to the camera.
My next thought is that the sides of the acrylic haven’t been sanded/polished enough, and they aren’t clear enough.
Here’s hoping we can get it working on Monday!
Well, we’re getting closer and closer to finishing up the hardware portion of MOOL. I’ll be posting a little bit about the current plans for software on the MOOL platform in a bit, but for today we had a little experiment that didn’t quite work as planned.
Both Bethany (the other person heavily involved in the project) and I are pretty new to the whole “electrical engineering” portion of this project. We got the LED’s in today, but the prototype boards which we’ll be using as makeshift LED holders (at the suggestion of Seth, creator of AudioTouch) have yet to arrive. Still, we were excited to get started, and I had ordered 5 extra LED’s (just in case something went horribly, horribly wrong :), so we decided to solder together the 5 LED’s and connect them to a 9V battery power supply (we’ll eventually be using a 8.5V power supply for the final project). The circuit fired right up, which was exciting for us as the first test of our “souldering abilities”.
So, then we decided to test out what we had thus far of the system. We placed the LED lights next to the acrylic, placed the camera underneath, and touched…and nothing happened. The LED’s were working, and we could see them just fine if we pointed them down at the camera, but when placed next to the acrylic, nothing happened when we touched. Not even a faint glimmer of hope.
Now, granted, we’re jumping the gun by a lot by attempting to “light” the whole table (currently a 2′ x 3′ surface) with just 5 LED’s placed close together AND on the same side of the acrylic. But, we were at least hoping for a teeny little reflection. Ah well.
We’re hoping the prototyping boards will arrive tomorrow morning, and then we can construct our 10 5-LED strips and give it a proper testing. There’s also a pretty good chance the Roscoe Grey will arrive tomorrow as well, so hopefully we’ll be able to put together some semblance of what the “finished prototype” will look like.