Final Project Idea
I have two ideas in consideration for my final project. The first is a physical recreation of the onion-chopping mini-game from Wii Party. When I was a kid, my friends and I would always play Wii Board Game Island, and this was one of my favorite mini-games. The user moves their Wii remote down in a chopping motion, and whoever “chops” the most number of times within the time limit wins.
For an Arduino/P5 recreation, I am imagining a chopping board covered in foil, and a knife made out of metal or wood covered in foil/copper tape, so that whenever the knife comes into contact with the chopping board, a switch is activated (similar to our “creative switch” assignment). There would be two players and two chopping boards hooked up to different pins on the Arduino, and these pins would send signals to the P5 screen, which would be a scoreboard. Every time the switch activates (a person chops once), their score would increase by one. The p5 program would also be running a stopwatch for one minute and beep when the minute is up. One issue is that I don’t know what I would use as the thing to be chopped, because unless I use real knives, which would be too dangerous, it would be impossible to actually cut through much. An alternative is to simply not have any object to be chopped, and to simply erect a picture of the Wii Game next to my setup so that people understand the concept.
My second idea is to make a “psychic hotline”, which would kind of be like these Magic 8 balls,
except that it would be a cardboard phone that is hollow inside, to allow for a servo motor and an attached spinning wheel. The phone buttons would be Arduino buttons, and depending on the last button that the user presses, the spinning wheel would rotate until the designated psychic message shows through a cutout in the cardboard. The whimsy of this project would mostly be the aesthetic and the intricacies of cardboard construction, which I have been enjoying in making my previous projects. P5 would function as a backdrop with twinkling stars, instruct users on which number to dial for which type of psychic question (love, career, self-improvement, etc.) and provide error messages if the user has not inputted the correct phone number. The limitation of this project is that there would only be a few interactions before the user gets bored, because the spinning wheel can only accommodate so many messages.
