‘My Machine’ was a very refreshing project.

I first went to a primary school and held a brainstorming session with children of 8 years old. They had some awesome (sometimes over the top) ideas about their dream machine (You can see a compilation of the drawings on the left).

 

Afterwards It was my task to develop one idea. The main idea from one of the kids was to create a ‘safe/chill zone’.

Because I wanted the kids to have an interaction with the machine I decided to implement a reversed escape room. This means that they had to fulfill multiple tasks before they were able to enter the safe room.

 

I wrote a code in Arduino which broadly tells (in code) the following: ‘only when the 5 sensors are fulfilled the motor starts to work and the lock opens.’

For the manufacturing of this unit I used 5 different sensor inputs: light, humidity, sound, contact and submerging into water.
For example: with the humidity sensor you had to breath out hard enough that the sensor detects enough humidity and an LED will start to burn.

For the sound sensor you had to produce enough decibels, the light sensor had to be covered, and so on.

When the code was written I created the door panel and installed the Arduino, sensors and wires.

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Than I had to contact a high school to create the ‘cocoon’. Like you can see in the pictures we managed to use an older project and placed it horizontally, so we didn’t had to start from scratch.  

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It was very interesting to work with people from different ages and to see the result in Technopolis which is a science museum in Mechelen (Belgium).