Fortune Teller, a 18h project made in CIID together with Laura Boffi for Massimo Banzi's Physical Computing course. The aim of this short exercise was to interface two Arduinos : one as sensor inputs and the other as an output. The two microcontrollers communicate using the serial port.



Laura worked on the sensors side of the system. She integrated a piezoelectric sensor, used for knock detection, and a thermistor for measuring temperature. The knocking gesture activates the temperature sensor - a temperature calibration is also performed after eacg knock. There is then a 5 seconds window where the user rubs the magic wand. The physical result is a temperature difference between the knocking moment and the elapsed time. This information is read by the "input" microcontroller and sent to the "output" one using the serial port.

My participation on the project was in the programing of the system's output side - an LCD display with LED based backlight. There is an array of strings stored in the Arduino. Since the device is a fortune teller, the output should have a random dimension. Therefore an analog input was used as a random number generator. The incoming information from the other microcontroller is combined with the random generated data in order to select one of the pre-definitade sentences present in the string array. The sentence is then displayed on the LCD.
My learnings in this project are related to the use of LCD displays and to the combination of several microcontrollers in order to build sensor/actuator networked systems.

Fortune Teller from laura boffi on Vimeo.

This was a group project made by Benoit Espinola and Laura Boffi
CIID - 2009