Posted on Tue 7 Apr 2026
the beginning - Feb 2026
A small step into coding Arduino's. A big step for me!
Posted by
Alison.Stott
My practice explores the spaces between art and science, craft and technology, glass and light, material process and lived experience.After more than two decades working in digital VFX, I shifted my focus toward glass and light as a way to escape the precision and predictability of a screen-based…Project
Home is Where the Heart Beats
The Big Idea!An immersive installation consisting of vertical columns of light in glass, which responds to visitors movement and heartbeatInspired by huygens synchronisation - which explains how metronomes/pendulums swinging out of time come into synchronisationHow the idea of home isn't just a…A small step into coding Arduino's. A big step for me!
Work began by plugging a strip of LED's into an Arduino and connecting an Ultrasound proximity sensor.
Having never coded an Arduino before I set about making a strip of LED's light up when somebody came near them. ChatGPT was very useful for helping me with the code!
Managed to get this working fairly quickly, having already tried a motion sensor, which I discounted as not being the right tool for what i wanted. The motion sensor had some built in delays which meant it couldn't continually monitor and feedback, so wasn't responsive enough to track movement. It worked as a switch to turn something on for a prescribed amount of time, triggered by movement, not to track where somebody was. I wanted that interactive feedback, rather than just turn on/turn off
This sensor worked well, so the next stage was to connect a pulse reader to measure somebodies heartbeat in order to time the 'pulsing' of the LEDs using their own pulse