High-Five Door Handle
One small project that demonstrates my quick prototyping ability, as well as knowledge in coding and user experience, is the high-five door handle I designed while learning how to use Arduino.
The Brief
This task was not a big assignment - the brief was to simply create a small interactive product using Arduino, so that we could then prototype a tangible interaction. Although this task was small, it was extremely efficient at teaching me how make products talk through interacting with them. Thinking about the feedback, attention, and status of a product, and how software and hardware may combine to create different user experiences.
The concept
The idea behind the high-five door handle was to take an everyday repetitive and boring task that nobody gives much thought about, and create a fun and interactive experience.
The door handle operates electronically, and will only open if it registers a signal from your house key fob (like a keyless push-start car). A beautiful thing about this design, is that you can also lock your house like a car with a button as you're walking away from the front door.
Rapid Prototyping
I drew the design up on CAD using fusion-360, and began writing the code to match.
An example of the code I wrote for the Arduino software.
The handle also featured Red, yellow and green lights to signal what state it was in (Red = Locked, Green = Open etc.), and a buzzer which sounded at different frequencies depending on if you tried to open the door without the key fob nearby.
To open, the tilt / motion sensor must register motion, it would then flash green, activate the buzzer at a high-pitch frequency to signal it opened successfully, and then activate the motor that was holding the internal lock mechanism in place.
The 3D printed working prototype based off the CAD model previously shown.
