Prototype/Outcome

Timmy Toaster is an ordinary toaster enhanced with an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and a 30 pixel RGB light strip. To build Timmy, I removed the existing circuit board and power cable from a toaster (mostly for my own safety), and embedded the Arduino and light strip inside of the appliance. The Arduino was mounted onto a breadboard connected to the LED strip, and the entire thing was mounted to the heating element of the toaster. And because I had removed all of the circuitry that could possibly heat up the heating element, this was no longer an issue. This meant, while it could no longer toast, it could light up.

Because the onboard color sensor was now hidden behind the plastic shell of the toaster, I drilled a hole in the plastic lined up to where the sensor was mounted inside of the toaster. Googly eyes were glued beside the sensor holes to indicate to the user where to “show” Timmy the entertainment, and little legs made of pipe cleaners were added for a little bit of whimsy.

The code was based heavily on this documentation: https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/nano-33-ble-sense/rgb-sensor

It was modified with delays, conditionals, and some random number generation in order to imbue a sense of “personality,” but the algorithm essentially determines a color, and checks to see if the color sensor matches that value within a countdown. I am however particularly proud of this function I wrote that gradually shifts the LED strip between two colors:

for (int i = 0; i <= 255; i++) {
	updateColors(255-i, 0, i); // Shift colors red -> blue
	delay(30 * 1000 / 255); // Delay for a total of 30 seconds
}