Investigation 1: Picky Doorbell

Intention

Animism, a word that originated from Latin that means"breathe, spirit and life," is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. After reading Articles about Animism, I started thinking about its relevance to smart devices. What if machines really have consciousness someday in the future? No one can give an answer to what is to come. But at least with today's technology, humans can actively give machines the ability to have emotions or characteristics when humans are interacting with the machine. 

Given the objects(a LED strip and a Doorbell), I began to think: What if a doorbell has preferences about colors? How will she react to the color she likes or doesn't like? So, I decided to set my doorbell to be a very picky device about the color of human clothes. For example, if she likes blue, she will only ring when you are wearing blue when pressing the doorbell. The sound will be similar to the sound of entering the door code to tell you that your dress"code" is correct. If you wear red or green to ring the doorbell, she will not make any sound. But our doorbell lady will also graciously display the color of your clothes on the LED strip just to show you that she sees you even if you are not wearing something she likes.

Context

The idea of creating this color-picky doorbell is that I found that sometimes there are always people not wearing the correct color of clothes at parties or meetings, even when the dress code is announced. So, this picky doorbell will be a possible solution to prevent people from wearing the incorrect color of clothes because they will know the doorbell will never ring, and I will never come open the door for them unless they follow the dress code. The pun here is that the doorbell lights up with the sound of entering door codes when the dress"code" is correct. 

Prototype/Outcome

The prototype of the picky doorbell was initially composed of a LED strip with 30 lights, a doorbell button, and the Arduino Nano. The built-in color sensor of Arduino Nano does the color reading process and shows the color that it reads on the LED strip. The doorbell button is only a button that tells the device to start sensing colors.

Then, I begin to wonder if there is a way to give physical feedback to people, telling people that the color is correct. So I added a buzzer (piezo speaker) to the device that makes sounds when the correct color is detected—initially, the buzz sounds would buzz constantly. But I then thought about the pun of dress"code" as the doorbell somehow can also act as entering a code. So I mutated the code a little and made it light up and buzz one by one. And I found that 30 LEDs will take 30 seconds to finish the whole process, and no one would have a 30-character door code. So I shortened the strip into 5 lights.

Process

My process of work was quite smooth. 

I first got the built-in color sensor of Arduino Nano to work and read colors in the serial monitor using the APDS9960 library.  I set a 500 delay to tell the Arduino to stop a while before reading again so it won't constantly read RGB value.

I then wanted to visualize the color on the LED strip. The trick here is that as I only set three colors(red, green, and blue), any color with an r, g, or b value greater than the other two will be detected as the color. For example, r = 30, g = 29, b = 29 will be read as red. 

However, the sensor is sensitive to the color of the environment. It sometimes reads r value more than g and b values. So I had to reduce the r value in the function by dividing the read r-value by 1.5. 

The next step is to tell the buzzer to make a sound when the color sensor detects the selected color while the doorbell button is pressed(val == 1). 

Reflection

I am happy to see that the doorbell successfully functions. 

But I am also thinking about does this device indeed brings convenience to human life or no. It is absolutely interesting for a doorbell to have a color preference, but what if there is an emergency? What if someone really needs to see me but is not wearing the "correct color"? After all, machines are built to serve people and help make a better life. I hope I can come up with better solutions to this in the future.

Open Questions and Next Steps

One main problem of the device is that it starts sensing colors when the doorbell button is pressed, which senses the color of the environment before sensing the color of clothes. I got a suggestion to set the initial LED color to white when the RGB value is not as high as the clothes' color. I think this will be a good iteration for my project.

Attribution and References

Detecting Colors with the Nano 33 BLE Sense Board

https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/nano-33-ble-sense/rgb-sensor

How to use a Buzzer (or Piezo Speaker)

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-use-a-Buzzer-Arduino-Tutorial/