For the Attention project, I decided to make a “smog detector”. I put “smog detector” in quotes there because it doesn’t actually detect smog, rather it just sounds its alarm continuously. Of course, that would be annoying to be going on constantly, so I added an internal tilt switch that deactivates the alarm when you tilt the device forward. While alarming, the LCD screen reads “Smog Detected, Levels Exceeded”, the LED’s blink, and the buzzer oscillates loudly between two frequencies.
I thought this would be an interesting idea for something that simply draws a lot of attention with its lights and noise, while in a way also making an argument. Smog is something that is so ubiquitous that we don’t think about it, to the extent that a “smog detector” could feasibly always be detecting smog. In sounding its constant alarm to show the presence of smog, the device makes a point that we don’t think about smog despite its constant presence.
I encountered a couple of code problems while developing the “smog detector”. For one, since the LED’s seemed to work fine when I set them to HIGH from the start, I neglected to call pinMode to set them to outputs. Since the default setting is INPUT_PULLUP, I was effectively powering them with an extra 10k resistor in the way, which made them exceedingly dim. I eventually figured that out and was able to get them to go to full brightness. I also had a lot of trouble getting the buzzer to work, and went through a couple different buzzer modules before realizing I needed to use the tone function instead of analogWrite.
Once I had finished building the core components of the device, I decided to add some basic decoration and instructions to the box. Since the box itself was just repurposed cardboard, a sharpie made for a good way to draw clean looking indicators and drawings.
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