Stonehouse - Basis of our Arduino Project

For the final part of the Transforming Stonehouse work that we have been doing we are required to develop and implement an Arduino based project as our final realisation of the ideas we have been investigating throughout the year.  Being that our group has based our work on light and communication we therefore need to come up with an idea for our arduino project that implements this idea in some way.  We had already looked a lot into what we could project as part of our project and so felt it would be a more consistent idea if we used the arduino in some way to relate to a projection that could be projected in the Stonehouse area.  After looking at the various possibilities for arduino boards and relating this to the elements we have in the area of our site we decided that we would use the nearby pedestrian crossing as the main environmental change that would act as the input for our arduino.  Basically when a pedestrian presses the button on the pedestrian crossing a light is turned on on the pedestrian console.  We therefore felt that we could use a light sensor as part of the arduino to detect this change and trigger a change in the projection. 

The basis behind this idea is that this could be used to improve the efficient use of pedestrian crossings and traffic lights as most often people press a pedestrian crossing button but they cross when they decide it is safe.  This is quite often not when the traffic lights have stopped the traffic and so traffic gets stopped unnecessarily.  By triggering a projection when the pedestrian presses the button they may well be distracted and so will wait for longer at the crossing making it more likely that they will cross at the right time. 

The process that our arduino project will go through is as follows:
pedestrian presses button - light turns on - light sensor sees change and change is sent to the arduino - arduino data is sent to flash app - flash interprets data and changes image accordingly.

The next step in this project development is to consider what and how the projection will change.