This toy is a nice touch for an office desk and a great companion to any mom who loves fall. It is designed to have a calm and festive presence. Your boss giving you a hard time? Rotate the snow globe and watch the LEDs flicker on and off, change colors, and interact with the glitter peacefully floating to the bottom, soon you'll forget about those pesky deadlines. The autumn tree will remind you that your family is coming into town for Thanksgiving, if shaking the snow globe again doesn't help, I'd suggest a red wine.
The snow globe takes in its current position (and your stress) using a triple axis accelerometer and creates a LED display of wonder. The code and circuitry in this project aren't too strenuous, but the enclosure/display is; so, I would recommend this tutorial to people with 6 weeks of physical computing experience or a masochist streak.
Materials
Here are the supplies you will need:
-Arduino Uno (or Arduino uno mini if you want a smaller, sleeker enclosure)
-Red LED, Yellow LED, RGB LED
-Perf board, wires, solder, etc
-Power source (I used a 9v battery)
-1/8" thick plywood
-Snow globe (I would highly recommend using a larger globe, but if you're balling on a budget, like me, this one works fine)
-Craft wire
-Plastic leafs
-Glitter
-Hot glue & silicone sealant
Brainstorming, Prototyping, & Failing
I started out with four very different ideas, but I settled on the snow globe because I figured I could give to my mother for her birthday. It took me an incredibly long time and several trips to Michael's to come up with an idea for the display. I fluctuated between a haunted house with an LED lighting up the windows, some sort of forest theme and a tree with LEDs at the tips of the branches.
I opted for a maple tree theme. I made a lower scale version of the tree, and laser cut a cardboard box enclosure once I got the specs of the snow globe.
I ran into a lot of issues when I was in the begging stage of building my circuit. The accelerometer was all over the place; it kept freezing and messing up my code. In the end, the problem was a poor connection and soldering fixed the problem. I was also a bit too ambitious in the beginning. I started building a circuit that used an accelerometer and a potentiometer, but I scratched that idea when I realized I had a week left and next to nothing to show.
Circuits
The biggest lesson I learned doing this project is that soldering is hard. Like...really hard. Building the circuit on the breadboard was fine, but transferring that to a perfboard and soldering everything took longer than I anticipated. I had to re-solder the same connections multiple times because the wires would keep snapping. It didn't help that I had to twist and turn the wires, so it loosely looked like a tree. In the end, I would say I spent 55% of my time soldering and building the circuit.
Code
I ran into a couple of bumps with the coding, and my final program is a dumbed down version of what it could be, but hey, at least it runs.
I have like ten variations of this program on my computer, all with slight variations. My vision was to shake the snow globe, so it would turn the LEDs on and then once you set the snow globe down on a flat surface the RGB LED would cycle through autumn colors (red, orange, yellow) until all the glitter inside the globe settled. I got the toy to mostly do this no problem, but it was with the delay function. Using the delay function made the toy less responsive and awkward and I was in the midst of trying to reprogram it using the milis() function when I ran out of time. I literally ran out of time. It was like the last 60 seconds of a cooking show competition. I was frantically trying to code and blow dry the glue around my enclosure and clean up the mineral oil I spilt 5 minutes before I needed to leave for school. I decided to scrap the cycling RGB LED and just have the accelerometer change the colors, so it would be more responsive.
Building the Enclosure
This is my favorite part of the project, but putting the entire thing together was a nightmare. I was on top of it when it came to gathering my materials, designing and laser cutting a box, and building a wire tree display, but I decided to wait till the morning the project was due to actually fill the snow globe with mineral oil. A terrible idea.
I drilled a hole in the lid of the snow globe, so I could thread the wire through and then I glued around it so the mineral oil wouldn't leak. The mineral oil leaked. In retrospect, I really should have given myself more time to experiment with how to fully seal the wires before I went gun ho and tried to do it on the first attempt. Lesson learned.
Anyways, here's how to build the snow globe.
Step 1- Assuming you have all the necessary supplies, laser cut box.
Step 2- Assemble and glue box (don't glue the top lid on)
Step 3- After soldering all necessary components, shape wires attached to LEDs into weird cactus-tree hybrid. Make sure to insult connections, so they don't get crossed when you add the decorative wire.
Step 4- Slide tree through lid and into place. It is much easier to guide some wires through a small hole that it is an entire tree.
Step 5- Take craft wire and carefully wrap around wires. Cut various sizes of wire and tie to tree, creating tree branches.
Step 6- Take plastic leafs, cut them down to size, poke one small hole in each, and attach to tree branches. Feel free to add other decoration.
Step 7- Add mineral oil and glitter to snow globe.
Step 8- Screw circuit/lid combo into place and seal up any leaks.
Step 9- Put dangly circuits snuggly into place inside wood box. Close the lid.
Step 10- Shake snow globe and be amazed
Taking it Further
In the next iteration of the snow globe toy I need to find a better solution for running the wires into the globe, one in which it doesn't leak. I would also like to use either a smaller Arduino board or larger globe. One of the visual flaws of my project is that the globe and box holding the circuits are disproportionate. The box is too big for the globe, and it makes it look awkward and clumsy. I could solve this by using a smaller Arduino, so the box could be smaller, or scaling up the globe. It would also be nice to play with the code a little more. I focused most of my efforts on the enclosure and neglected the coding aspect of the project. It was a missed opportunity to make something more smooth and interactive.
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