ITP Blog

Light and Interactivity

Week 3

This week we were supposed to build a controller for a 12-volt light controller, the schematic was pretty straightforward. With an arduino connected to a MOSFET transistor controlling the ground of the 12 volt light. And a potentiometer to the analog input on arduino controlling the amount of the exponential fade curve. I used a protoboard to solder all the parts and have a solid and permanent rig.

I played around with the input to make it less noisy and shaky, with no avail. I tried adding a delay which helped but also introduced latency. Then as suggested in class I tried the Kalman filter which helped a lot with the smoothing of the reading of my pot. Made the fade a lot smoother and almost no flickers with lower values.