Xiaoyun Liu
Soybean Hourglass
In the first plan of my midterm project, I was trying to develop my fabrication final project, a pendulum. To add some light on it to make it turn up when the pendulum toward one side. Then I realized that it will be very hard to achieve because the pendulum will still move even though the servo is not moving.
When I did some research online, I find a very interesting video, which using the Arduino and LED lights to make the hourglass. Then I thought about I can make an hourglass the light will be on whichever side the sand flows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdSF9bRtMA
At first, my plan was to use iron powder to attach the wires and make the light bulbs turn on. It can make people can hand on the sand feeling. Until I went to talk to David Rios about my plan. He suggested me to use a tilt switch. The switch has a metal ball inside when it touches the bottom, it conducted, when it is on the top, the switch cut off.
I planed to make three layers of my hourglass: the breadboard layer, the light and switch layer, and the sand layer.
I brought some switches and lego breadboard which can fit in the box. And some woods to make the box. I used a laser cutter to cut the wood. And cut the acrylic sheet.
I did some tests for my switches and light bulbs.
I attached the breadboard on the wood and cut a space to make the wires can have a space to go through.
The last steps were to put the sands in and attach the layers altogether, but the sand leak. Then another two ITPer Wei and Tianjun suggested me to change sands to balls, and they thought about there are some ITPer who were using beans to make their project. So I borrowed some soybeans from them and put them in the hourglass. It works very well.
