Outcome

Project: Ambient Orb

Objective: create an ambient calendar alert that starts to light up red fifteen minutes before a Google Calendar event and changes to a white light during fifteen minutes after the event starts.

Process:

I began by creating a Particle app on the Web IDE. I wrote a function that gradually lights up to red for fifteen minutes and then gradually changes the color to white for the next fifteen minutes. 

A challenge was to figure out how to gradually increase the intensity of the light. Given a specified duration, I calculated how much time should be delayed in between each increase in pixel intensity and looped through the intensity until I hit the maximum intensity specified. This seemed to work well. 

To connect this function to IFTTT, I first used "Particle.function" to publish the function to the Particle Cloud. 

Finally, I integrated Google Calendar with Particle by creating an 'applet' on IFTTT.com. 

Figure 1. Wiring of neopixel ring onto Argon

Figure 2. Lit up neopixel ring

Video 1. Light up to red phase

Video 2. Change from red to white phase

Figure 3. IFTTT Applet Interface