Welcome to week 7! This is the week for sourcing our materials and getting started on the software and hardware of Fading Forests. We do have to purchase the materials ourselves but the greatest challenge would be trying to obtain the acrylic rods and tubes as well as the laser beams. We have laser pointers, but it would not give the effect that we want to showcase. The pointers just show a dot on the ceiling, but we want a beam. As a result, we turned to the "trusty" online websites such as Amazon, Ebay and Creatron.
After days of searching for laser beams, we just had no luck. They were either too expensive or they would take over a month to ship to Canada. Even Creatron did not sell them. We realized that if we wanted laser beams we would have to either get access to industrial type lasers or spend a fortune. So the question remains... what is our new plan/solution? What can we use to get a similar effect, within out budget and time limit. Therefore, we began doing a bit more research on the acrylic type material and how it works with neopixels, before actually buying them. After watching quite a few YouTube videos about the acrylic rods, we saw that once you put a really bright light at the bottom of the rod, it would light up the whole rod. This was a huge relief and break through for us because we were not sure what we could have used as the replacements. The other task was trying to source these acrylic rods and tubes. However, after doing even more extensive research, we realized that there was an actual store 5 minutes away from YorkU, known as "Plastic World". Finally! Our structure materials were bought and we also got the RFID tag kit, neopixel strip, transmitter and receiver (communication), photoresistor and neopixel flower (for the bottom light). Our next phase is starting on the coding! Good Luck Everyone1 :)