PCOMP final part1
Updated: Jan 13, 2022
Final part1

Inspiration:

The idea of my final project is one idea that I didn’t achieve in project 2, which is to build a crayon machine. If you have seen my project 2, you might notice that I’m obsessed with the idea of converting colors and sounds; in this project, I want to continue this idea and make a further step.
Based on project 2, I’m planning to add some functions to the color picker, making it not only be able to capture the colors on the canvas and turn on the lights and audio but also give audiences some physical feedback, like souvenirs. In this case, the souvenir will be a crayon.
My original idea about the interaction of project 3 is to let audiences pick a color from the canvas on p5, then the crayon's raw material particles of different colors will fall from the container to a mold. The raw materials will be melted then transformed into a new crayon after cooling.
But I’m not sure if the idea will work, especially about the material and the temperature, so I did some experiments. Turns out, to make sure raw material melted perfectly, the temperature must be very high. It’s very unstable and dangerous to put the heating part in this project. Besides, it also takes longer than I thought to cool down, this delay might affect the interactive experience in a bad way.


Then I changed my idea, to divide my original idea into two parts the first is to obtain raw materials and the second is to make crayons. In the first part, the audience uses the picker to get material particles with the same color they pick. In the second part, the audience melts these particles and creates the crayon by themselves (this part is not the automated manufacturing of machines).

I’ll focus more on the first part, combine what I’ve already done in project 2 with a vending machine. The electronic components that I‘m going to use are LED lights, servo motors, and color sensors.