Glass and Light

Idea

My wife needed a way to see how certain pieces of glass reacted to different light sources. I asked a bunch of questions which she then got annoyed with, because my questions were both scienc-y and not artistic. She is an artist who works mostly with fused glass and so my technical questions were slightly annoying to her.

I got her to realize that what she really wanted was to know that when a light has certain RGB values, the glass will reflect certain wavelengths of light and not others. In general terminology a light is considered "warm" when it is most yellow/orange, and "cool" when it is white with some hints of blue.

By being able to control the RGB values in a light source, I was able to provide her with a way to see, what the "warmth" or "coolness" of a light source actually meant in intensities of light. It also showed me an interesting property of the glass she was working with.

I used an LCD display for the RGB and incremental values, but a serial connection would also work. I chose an LCD so that it would be easier to record video of the light from the LED and the values it was using at the same time.

Parts

• 1 arduino (of course)
• LCD display
• RGB LED. I used a neopixel from adafruit.com since they are very bright and easy to use.
• Touch keypad. (Serial could have been used as well, but this makes the device more self contained as well.

Project Log

10:00pm Wife asks me to make a thing to put a rainbow light on a piece of glass to see how it looks 10:01pm I ask a series of very scientific questions that annoy this piss out of my wife, but I'm pissed too so what ever. 2:30am project complete enough. :-)