Group 1: Rain Loving Umbrellas (Gemini)
Created by:
Ishana Rhea Ramtohul
Adza Tarka
Sofia Gervasoni
Nikolai Langguth
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Project Brief: Rain Loving Umbrellas
An umbrella in your rack sack or bag is a necessity when you are living in the UK. Conventional and common umbrellas have one purpose of either sheltering you from the rain or protecting you from burning sunrays (not really an issue while living here!). Can you bring umbrellas to life by letting them light in different patterns through LEDs responding to rain drops? You can use pressure sensors to sense raindrops and light up the specific LEDs cluster. Or maybe you can use less expensive solutions understanding that water has high dielectric constant and hence resistance, which means it can change the voltage potential in a circuit such as our hand changing the flow of current in any electronic circuit.
Overview:
Climate in the UK is unpredictable, it could start pouring at any time in the day. This product is specifically designed to improve such experiences. Our interactive umbrella is connected to multiple LEDs which will react to the rain. If it is drizzling, it will create a ‘glowing’ effect by lighting up some LEDs. More LEDs are triggered depending on the rain intensity by using rain sensors that are attached to the umbrella.
An additional button is also present to change the colour of the LEDs depending on the personal choice of the user.
FEATURES:
- Windproof and lightweight
- Equipped with LED Light for increased visibility
- Futuristic design
- Different light effects depending on type of rain
- Different LED colours available
- Safe in the rain on a dark night
SPECIFICATIONS:
- 1 Button for switching colours: warm white, blue, red, purple
- Lighting mode: Gentle – Moderate – Full intensity flashing
- Battery: 1 x 9V battery
- LEDS: 240
- LED Strip Length: 50 cm
- Rib Number: 8
- Length: Approx. 80cm
- Unfold Diameter: Approx. 90-100cm
Purpose:
The reason behind designing an interactive umbrella is to create a fun and exciting experience that makes the rainy season more enjoyable. Its purpose is to give the user a visual representation of the current rain conditions.
Storyboard:
Target audience:
Our main point of interest is Londoners as this city is known for its unpredictable weather and rainy days. However it can be suitable for any person living in such cities.
Market research:
Before finalising the design and functionalities of our object, we conducted a brief market research to analyze already existing electronic and interactive umbrellas.
Here are a few examples:
- Florabella – https://learn.adafruit.com/florabrella
- Stella – https://www.instructables.com/id/Pressure-Activated-Light-Up-Umbrella
We added a link to YouTube Channel for more documentation we could not add to the blog because of file limit.
TASK LIST
Team Members:
Adza
Sofia
Nikolai
Rhea
- Brainstorming – all
- Research – all
- Product main idea – all
- Concept + Sketches – Sofia
- Order components – Rhea
- Storyboard – Sofia
- Low-fi prototype – Nikolai
- Pseudo code – Adza ,Rhea
- Test components – Adza
- Code – Adza , Rhea, Sofia
- Assemble components – all
- High-fi prototype – Nikolai
- Final touch ups – all
- Testing and Debugging – Adza , Rhea
- Maker Manual – Nikolai , Sofia
- Pictures,videos – Sofia
- Meeting Notes – Adza
- Design Blog – Nikolai + all
- Presentation – all
GANTT CHART
The gantt chart helps us to :
- Visualize linked tasks, due dates and dependencies.
- Recognize the amount of time necessary to complete specific tasks.
- Keep track of assignment of roles for each part of the project.
- keep team members accountable over the course of the project
Meeting 1: 12th of November
Goal: Pick and submit a project
The team met to review all the available project briefs and discuss possible solutions to each brief. Based on this discussion, the team decided that “Rain Loving Umbrellas” would be the most interesting project to work on. Additionally, each member’s skills would allow them to contribute sufficiently and efficiently to the project. After submitting the project decision, the group briefly brainstormed and refined initial solution ideas.
Brainstorming Mind Map
Idea 1 : Having a puddling/pulsing effect – with rain drops and pressure sensors
Idea 2 : Umbrella for urgency/mood detection in public environments
Idea 3 : LED swirls and arrow detection responding to wind intensity
Meeting 2: 14th of November
Goal: Decide final project concept
The team used this meeting to decide on and work towards refining the final project concept:
An umbrella with sensors on the outside and lined with LED strips on the inside. The LEDs would react to the rain/water sensor readings.
The sensors would have three logic levels:
Drizzle (less water) – some lights turning on and off
Rain (more water) – more lights turning on and off
Pour (most water) – most intense flashing on the lights
The target users are commuters.
It was decided there should be an optional function to turn all the LEDs on and have one solid light shown, which can be turned on and off with a switch or button. Users can choose different colours to represent different moods.
Questions and Next Steps:
– How would we drive all LEDs on umbrella?
– Will we have a button to turn on and off all LED strips?
– How many LED strips will we need?
– How will the umbrella close?
– How many water sensors will we need?
– Can we use water sensors or rain sensors? Is there a difference?
Plan for next meeting: Decide on and order components
Meeting 3: 15th of November
Goal: Decide on components and order them.
The team ordered the components necessary for the project. The inner dimensions of the umbrella are 50 cm from center to outer rim, and as it is planned to have 8 LED strips lining the inner umbrella, the team ordered four 1 meter long LED strips, which will be cut in half and soldered together. The team decided to order 5 rain sensors which will be placed around the outer part of the umbrella for increased surface area and more rain change detection.The water sensor(s) will be used for testing to verify how the coding logic would work for the final product.
The team also plans to use an Arduino Nano instead of an Arduino Uno because of the limited space in the umbrella. Finally, a mini breadboard will be used to connect the power supply (9V Batteries) to all components. 9V Batteries will be used because the final product is intended to be portable, and we wont be able to connect to a mains or use a computer as the power source.
Items ordered:
4m LED strips
5 Rain Sensors
Already available:
Water Sensors
Arduino Nano
Mini Breadboard
Two 9V Batteries
The team agreed to design a low-fi prototype in the next meeting and start experimenting with the already available components, particularly the water sensors.
Meeting 4: 19th of November
Goal: Build Low-fi Prototype
During this meeting the team designed the low-fi prototype. This prototype will be used to inform the design of the final product or at least the high-fi prototype. We used the low-fi prototype to plan the overall layout of the components on the umbrella.
Low-Fi Prototype
Meeting 5: 22nd of November
Goal: Initial Testing of Components
The team tested the functionality of the water sensor and LED Strips separately to understand the requirements for the components to work well in the final design.
First, we tested the water sensor.
The water sensor cannot be used in the final design because it measures depth of water instead of difference/change in surface area covered by water. We discovered this by printing the different values when the sensor was submerged in a cup of water versus when drops of water were placed on the sensor. We noticed the values printed to the serial monitor only changed when the sensor was placed in the cup of water and there was no change when we put small drops of water on the sensor.
The team will wait for the rain sensors to arrive to continue testing and developing the project.
Then, we tested the LED strips.We wanted to know how to individually control the LED strips to be able to achieve the ‘starry’ effect we wanted.
Meeting 6: 30th of November
Goal: Testing and Coding
Testing of Rain sensors:
In previous meeting, we cam to a conclusion that rain sensors would be a better component to use in our project. The team tested the rain sensor to understand how it works with water.
Diagram depicting rain sensor’s response to varied water intensity :
The rain sensor is connected as below. Each sensor needs to be connected to a Vcc, ground, a digital and an analog pin:
The rain sensors have a range of values from 0 to 1023. We divided it into three logic levels as we wanted – drizzling, raining and pouring and printed the values to obtain a range for each.
The team also decided to have four rain sensors along the umbrella instead of one. As a result, we would cover more surface area the giving accurate readings.
Further Testing of LED Strips:
Since now we know how to individually control the LEDs , we had to decide upon three different effects corresponding to our three logic levels – drizzliing , raining and pouring.
We decided to have less lights and longer delays for drizzling and as the intensity of rain increases, more leds are activated and delay time between each is much shorter.
Extra Feature -Button to change colours:
As an extra feature, we wanted the LEDs to light up in different colours for personal user preference rather than having just one colour.
We coded separately the functionality of a button and printing different values to the serial monitor. We made three arrays having rgb values of each desired colour and used button presses to go through the array.
Meeting 7: 2nd of December
Goal: Finish coding + Test and Debug
In this meeting, we began finalized the code that would be used for the final product and adjusted all parts of the umbrella accordingly. We had to adjust the potentiometers attached to the rain sensors because we found that the threshold values were too sensitive and there was not much surface area change to trigger pour from rain. We developed the following Pseudo Code from these experiments:
PSEUDO-CODE:
There is one main component which triggers the LED strips and actions: Rain sensors
We will use 4 rain sensors in this project :
Calculate Rain val by reading in all 4 values and averaging them.
CASE 1 – Not raining => negative feedback
If water sensor level(Rain val) is greater than 800
- switch off all LEDs
CASE 2 – Drizzling => slow positive feedback
If water sensor level(rain val) is between 400 and 800
- few random leds light up
- delay longer = 300ms
CASE 3 – Raining => faster positive feedback
If water sensor level(rain val) is between 250 and 400
- More random leds light up
- delay shorter = 100ms
CASE 4 – Pouring => very fast positive feedback
If water sensor level(rain val) is less than 250
- Even more and more random leds light up
- delay much shorter = 35ms
A button is added to the circuit to change the colours of the LEDs. Only four colours will be available – Red, Warm white, Purple, Blue.
Initialise 3 arrays RedVal , BlueVal , GreenVal
Insert numbers(0-255) in each array
If button is pressed , index=number of buttons pressed
Red colour = RedVal[index], Green colour = GreenVal[index], Blue colour = BlueVal[index]
We plan to begin assembling in the next meeting.
Meeting 8: 4th of December
Goal: Assemble components
Now we have the code that works perfectly with rain sensors which triggers different effects and a button to change colours. The team has to decide how to fit all the components and wiring onto the umbrella.
At this stage we had to take into consideration of the design principles when it comes to user interaction.
Design Choices:
Design plays a crucial role when it comes to creating an object because it defines the object-user relationship which leads to a successful product.
We had to think about effective design decisions of integrating the circuit and wires on the umbrella. A good design should have no hidden or invisible affordances, not confuse or irritate the user, impede them in any way, have an intuitive and easy-to-use/learn interface and, most importantly, offer them a unique, pleasant and problem-free experience. A good design will also follow Norman’s (Design of Everyday Things) core principles: usability, utility and experience. And this is what we tried to accomplish for our final product :
- ambient lights: LEDs attached on the inside of the umbrella – users will be more exposed to the effect of the leds instead of not seeing them at all.
- the pushbutton: placed at the handle to give easy access to user.
- Perceived Affordances: We want the umbrella to look normal , that is, have the same standards to what it is used for.
- Visibility: only one button to click through the colours, until eventually off.
- Wiring should be hidden as it may confuse the user and also have a better finish.
High-fi prototype
Conclusion:
– Design an extra part that can hold the button at the handle
– Make a pouch that can hide all the wiring, breadboard and Arduino Nano at the top of the umbrella
– Have a battery power source
Meeting 9: 6th of December
Goal: Assemble components
From our previous meeting we realised we needed an extra accessory to hold the button. This part was designed in AutoDesk Fusion 360 and then 3d printed.
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The team had to solder multiple components together and to the Arduino Nano.
Meeting 10: 7th of December
Goal: Final Touch ups and Testing
Final Testing was completed when the umbrella was fully assembled to ensure each part worked as expected. Each component was tested individually in seperate sketches for easy debugging, since we had already wired all parts together. This meeting was successful and there were no unexpected problems with the device.
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Final Product
Lighting modes:
Meeting 11: 8th of December
Goal: Finish presentation slides and practice
Link to presentation at beginning of document
Meeting 12: 10th of December
Presentation Day
