This week things definitely started to pick up! We had our first piece of assessment for the Physical Computing Project and the starting step to breaking down and creating a solution to our problem space. We have really progressed our thoughts since the presentation we completed. I have a much better idea of what our end goal is and what my product will entail.

I'm interested in creating a form that can have an emotional impact on the user and create motivation for them to improve their energy consumption. An idea/inspiration I had when brainstorming potential forms was Olaf, the snowman from Frozen. He brings a lot of emotion to a snowman which creates that connection between the audience and the character.

There is still a lot of planning to do for the next step in this project. I need to start breaking down my plan from the proposal even further and begin working on that (I probably won't start that until after the Easter break though).

For now, my focus is becoming more comfortable with Arduino. We had a tutorial on it on Thursday and my goal over the break is to play around with it more and with the different sensors to see what will work well in my project. I was having a browse on Jaycar today on different Arduino sensors and there are so many cool sensors to play around with! I saw one that can detect alcohol levels which can dupe as a breathalyzer which would have worked perfectly for this cup idea a few of us were talking about at the beginning of the semester. The idea was a cup that you could bring to a social outing that would detect alcohol levels and change colours when you were getting close to the limit and then becoming over the limit. This would have been great when you're designated driver and you're not quite sure on your intolerance level and what percentage of alcohol your drink is thus not knowing whether you're under the legal limit to drive. Whilst this sensor is no way helpful for Energy Saving Emily, it was still a pretty cool sensor and I was really interested in exploring what other sensors can do/detect and what you can build from that.