Strong is the Force, with this Padawan. To coincide with the latest installment of the continuing saga from a galaxy far, far away, [Rohit Gupta] built a Star-Wars themed interactive doormat. The doormat detects a footstep using capacitive sensing and plays a random Star Wars audio clip like the opening theme or the Imperial March or a famous phrase from the movie. Check out the video below the break.
The current setup is temporarily breadboarded, but we are sure it will be popular enough with his visitors to make him tidy it up. The hardware consists of an Arduino with an audio shield connected to a pair of speakers. A capacitive wire loop under the mat and a capacitive sensor tuned to the mat size wire take care of the sensing.
When Earth people step on the mat, the sensor triggers the Arduino to play a random audio clip from the SD card. The capacitive sensing is taken care by the TP223 1-key touch pad detector chip (PDF), which he mounted on a home etched board with SMD parts. The whole bundle is powered by a small “power bank” battery pack like the ones used to charge mobile phones.
a RaspberryPi and a simple IR break-beam detection would have been easier and probably cheaper.
But would he have just as much fun creating it as he had now?
You wouldn’t even need to spend money on an extra microcontroller with the mp3 playback modules I have, they have 8 switch input lines for playing back the first 8 mp3s on the memory card, just wire one of those lines up to a floor mat switch..
im willing to bet those playback modules are microcontrollers
Please Stop propagating NERD stereo types by doing any project involving star wars.
Get a life beyond nerd topics like star wars and crap like that.
Please promote more Star Wars. The only people propagating NERD stereotypes are nerds themselves and rightly so. If there is steam punk and cosplay, then there has to be Star Wars and Trek.