Finishing the Door Mat

Rowan Lavelle

On Wednesday we put together the door matt. It was not a very hard task to do. We built it where we had two copper peices on both sides of the foam matt with a hole in between. This makes it so that when you stepped on the hole the copper touched and the eletrical current was connected causing the electricity to flow. Once we had that in place and functioning Sam, Graeme and I split up. Graeme and I on the button method and sam on the voice actvation method. The next day the voice activation peice for sam was not working too well because the voice sensor was poor and David's expertise did not cover programming this particular voice sensor. By messing around with it for a couple hours, to my knowledge, they got it to be partialy funcitonal. We decided not to use the sensor because it wasn't worth dealing with poor technology and we had a back up plan that would involve just the button. Then over on Graeme and I's side we hooked up the button, the servo, and the matt all to the same arduino and began programming it so that the botton was not able to be used until the electical  currnet in the mat was connected. When the button was pushed the servo would turn 180 degrees turning the door handel allowing the user to push his or her way though. Now, the only thing left in the project is to mount the device on a door.

written by Rowan Lavelle

editted by Graeme Mills

the brain storming

Rowan Lavelle

before lunch the entire class sat down and finished the junior level college eletrical engineering. we finished brushing up on talking about N and P type gates to create diffrenct trasactors. and we saw that we could not make an "and" gate but we could make a "not and gate" so we did that and then put another "not" gate infront of that to make an not and not gate, or an and gate. so after we figured that out we went to work on actually creating these transactors by using the N type and P type gates and we still have yet to wire them up.

 

after lunch in class we brainstormed about out ideas of the door. fist we wanted to draw a large diagram on the white board to map out everything that we wanted to do. the idea we had in mind was that you had to stand on a sertain part of the door mat to have two peices of copper metal touch to connect them running five volt into the breadboard telling the arduino to turn the servo to unlock the door. then you would have to say a phrase to have a diffrent servo turn the handel so you could nudge youre way though the door. this would work against burgalurs becuase no one would be paying attention to the way you stand only to the way youre speaking. so for the next two days we have our work cut out for us