Making Toys

Minho and I worked together to create two jealous siblings that live on your refrigerator. One is the freezer and the other is the fridge. Each one is happy when their door is opened, and will get sad if it has not been opened in a while. And if the other door is opened they will get jealous of their brother.

Each creature uses two photoresistors to see when the doors are open, and LCD screen to make faces, and a piezo speaker to make sounds.

Each one has a face and a sound for the following events:
– Neutral – It makes this face when the door is not open, but it has not been too long.

• Their Door Opened – Beeps hello and smiles. While the door is open, brief happy soudns play at random intervals.
• Their door closed – Beeps goodbye and winks.

– Lonely – If Fridge Friend goes too long without seeing the light in the, it will put on a sad face and cry at random intervals

• Jealous – If it’s own door has not been opened in a while and the other door is opened, Fridge Friend becomes jealous and will growl and long as the door is open.

The jealous sound will play over and over lowering each pitch and how long it draws out the last growl until the other door is shut again. At a certain point, the growl stops moving down in pitch (so as not to go bellow what the piezo can produce), but the length will continue to increase.

The entire thing is mounted on a box that stay outside of the fridge with the photoresistors being mounted inside and sensing the light.

The crying and other similar sounds happen on a semi-random basis, because no user would want to hear them constantly. In the video, I am using very short amounts of time for everything to trigger, but when actually setting this up, it would take several hours instead of several seconds to become lonely. It could still become jealous very quickly, though, since users don’t generally have their fridge or freezer doors open for very long.

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