My idea first sprung in to my mind from desperation. However, as I was watching Friends at the time, I knew that there were some great one liners that would make people laugh. Thus, I knew that I wanted to include this aspect into my project. I hoped that by exposing the audience to the familiar phrase “Joey doesn’t share food” some would be amused by the project. The idea was to create a pressure pad that would allow the user to place their food on it. If the mass of the food were to change due to someone else taking some food off the plate, a speaker would sound and the familiar “Joey doesn’t share food” phrase.
The first step was to create the pressure pad. I researched online some ways that I would be able to do this. On Youtube I found a couple of different ways, one of them was through some conductive foam:
This way did not work as I had hoped, the electricity would only conduct when the foam was pressed with extreme pressure and due to the nature of the foam the input values changed too much. The values were also at a great range so smoothing them out would not solve the problem so easily.
I then found a tutorial for making a pressure pad, the concept was simple enough and thus I made a prototype:
Unfortunately this ended up being a mere switch which is not what I wanted.
Lastly, I chose to use a pressure switch. At first I avoided this due to the size. It was too small for the idea that I originally had in mind. However, I was able to solve it by creating a platform that would concentrate all of its forces on one spot.
For the sound I was able to rent an mp3 shield. I soldered the shield and with the patience and help from Adham I was able to download the mp3 sound I wanted and programmed the redBoard to trigger the sound when the input from the pressure sensor changed by a factor or 10.
The physical box I created was designed using illustrator and laser cut. I believe the material is plywood. I regret not measuring the thickness of the wood as the wrong measurements destroyed the aesthetics of the box. I originally wanted to add springs in order to give the platform some give. However, I could not locate any and came up with a better solution. I decided to stable pieces of stretchy fabric to the bottom of the wood base.
Originally I planned on making the box bottomless, however due to the sensitivity of the sensor I had to cut out a loose bottom to make sure that I could open it and plug things in as well.
Here is a video of the final product: