2019
Project Context Personal
Roles Product design, Arduino programming, Networking
Challenge During the time that my relationship was long-distance, I was missing the physical dimension of being in love and the feeling of being in each other’s presence. I wanted to build something myself that could reduce our emotional distance.
Result I designed and built twin lamps that both change colour when being touched.
Details
A few years ago, I was living the long-distance relationship life with my girlfriend, which gave us some challenges. Fortunately, we live in a day and age where we can still talk and see each other every day through digital means, but it’s definitely lacking. You cannot touch and there is no feeling of presence. So, I decided to try to tackle it as a designer.
The result was the twin IoT (Internet of Things) lamps that I built. It allows us to share our presence to the other by touching the lamp. When one lamp is touched, both change in colour making the receiver aware of the presence of the other.
For the brains of the lamp, I used an Arduino Nano IoT and connected it with an LED matrix. The button was a touch capacitive sensor using tin foil hidden underneath the plastic top. The wooden and plastic parts were laser cut. The two lamps communicated to each other using the MQTT protocol.
Although, the relationship is not long-distance anymore, the lamps still serve as a nice memory of how we went through this period of our life.
