Helpful Information

The final project should demonstrate some of the following skills:

• Microcontroller-to-PC communication, through one of the following:
  • Asynchronous Serial communication
  • USB Human Interface Device (HID) control using Keyboard or Mouse libraries
  • Bluetooth LE communication (advanced)
  • MIDI (advanced)
  • Synchronous Serial communication (I2C or SPI) (optional, depending on project’s needs)

Sensor Datalogger and Visualizer (SPI, I2C SD Card)

Capture a time lapse with sensors and create a visualization or sonification that represents the changes over time.

There are many changes that are too slow for us to observe without lots of patience, but which give us good insights when we see their patterns played back in a time-lapse. For example, a graph of changes in the light in a space can tell us about the seasonal changes, or the human activity. Temperature changes can tell us how crowded a place is at different times of days. Air quality sensor readings over time can give us a picture of when production activities happen in a shop. Motion sensors graphed over time can show us traffic patterns of a space over the course of a day.

Pick a sensor that can measure changes in an environment and write a program that will take readings on a set interval and record them. Then find a way to present the readings in order to show the patterns of change over time. That might be as simple as a graph of the change over time generated by a spreadsheet, or it might be a sound program that converts the changes to pitches and plays the changes musically over time. Pick a way to represent the data that lets the viewer read and understand the changes that they can’t see in real-time.

You could capture the data by :

• Sending sensor data from an Arduino to your laptop over a few hours, and leaving the laptop alone (but secured).
• Sending the sensor data as USB keystrokes to your laptop over time and saving them to a file (command-S is also a keystroke)
• Recording data to a file on an SD card from an Arduino, then reading that data in p5.js

This project is a good project to combine asynchronous serial communication and data visualization in p5.js. Alternatively, it can be a good way to learn about reading and writing from files on an Arduino and in p5.js.