Paper Nature Concept

Earth After Dark

For this project I was inspired by NASA’s aerial photography of Earth at night. It’s always so beautiful to see the cities and countries form from collections of lights. Further, these photos show very clearly where nature still reigns king on our blue marble, so I thought representing that with paper would be perfect for this project.

I’ve chosen to create a globe out of heavy paper, which should prove to be durable and pleasing to the eye. I’ll attach LEDs and brass fasteners to the surface, which I’m going to wire through the globe to an Arduino and MakeyMakey board. The LEDs will be placed on major cities, and the brass fasteners will be spread around the arctic circle. The user can simply touch a fastener to make that part of the world experience daylight, casting the opposite hemisphere into darkness. I’ll represent this by turning on the LEDs for the dark side and having them twinkle. I really like this idea because the user gets to create a dynamic display through interaction, and the display itself represents a dynamic element: time.

So far, I’ve been able to get Max, the MakeyMakey board, and the Arduino to cooperate. The LEDs can be controlled with a keyboard and they flicker very nicely. I had a lot of issues with the code to make them flicker, which can be chalked up to me being rusty in C. I think most of the hard programming is out of the way. A lot of the work still to be done is creating the physical globe and wiring everything together.

I also have a reach goal of having the globe spin with a DC motor, but I’m not sure how feasible that will actually be.

LED Twinkle Test: