The main issue I tried to tackle was controlling the air flow in the box. I found (accidentally) that sticking my laser pointer in the bottom creating a small hole really helped move the smoke up and out the vent holes in the top, so this week my goal was to experiment with that.

I put a myriad of holes in both the top and bottom and played around with what would help the effect most. (Picture below)

I found having a few (around 3) holes worked best. But I also thought that the smoke forms looked rather “weak”. Originally I was only using one incense, so I decided to try adding more. Once I got to about 3 or 4 I thought the smoke density looked pretty good, but then that meant I had to go back and re-evaluate how many holes to use again. With more smoke, more airflow would be necessary and so I found I didn’t have enough holes and that they would need to be much bigger.

I also found my construction of a cardboard box covered in saran wrap wasn’t quite structurally good enough.  One, it didn’t allow for easy access to get the incense inside and two, it falls over a lot.

So my plan is make a better, more sturdy structure out of wood. I have also decided to add removable sides to provide easy access for the incense.

Next Steps:

-Playing with the bar code scanner to see how that does verses just waving a laser pointer around.

-Finding a good way to mount the laser source

-Making things interactive for the user

My final failure was forgetting publish and submit this until a week later. My bad.