Arduino electric eye and musical stairs

Summary of experiments with IR beam detection.

Initial testing with Radio Shack sensors and IRremote library: https://reactivemusic.net/?p=4027

musical stairs project

Built by students at Gould Academy, Bethel, Maine 2013.

Detects movement on stairs using individual IR sensor pairs on each step. When an IR beam is broken, a note is triggered and status LED lights up. Using an Ethernet shield, the data is tracked in a feed at xively.com

materials

Adafruit IR emitters and receivers

https://www.adafruit.com/products/157

https://www.adafruit.com/product/388

construction of sensor units

IR transmitters and receivers wired into terminal strips (no soldering):

transmitting unit:

schematic:

receiving unit:

schematic:

layout of stairs

Arduino connections and code

code:

[wpdm_file id=19]

(local file: musicalStairsVersion3tz2)

notes