When I thought of the ShotLight, it was supposed to be a series of tubes that a ball led through, eventually hitting some sort of sensor, and changing the state of a light. The problem was that you needed to get out of bed at night to turn out the light. By simply throwing a ball through a system of tubes to a sensor, you could avoid that all together. 

There were multiple parts to the project, so I figured that I should make the electronic part first. Using an article online, I created a fully operational outlet that was controlled by an electromagnetic switch. You could plug the outlet into the wall, and then your lamp into the outlet. The electromagnetic switch is controlled by five volts from a microprocessing chip, and then controlled the current going to the outlet from the wall. With some input to the Arduino (microprocessing chip) from a vibration sensor, the Arduino could send some output to the switch, which would then control the current to the outlet. By changing and monitoring the state of the light, the Arduino would have full control over the light.

After assembling the electronics, and verifying that they worked, we moved onto the physical part of the project. We starting making support structures for the tubes, and then decided that it would be too hard to set up the hole tube system. We decided to scrap that idea, and try something else. What we eventually decided to laser cut a circular target with a sensor on the back. 

The next problem that we had to deal with was eventually called the surge. It was an inexplicable and regular input surge to the Arduino. Somehow we needed to figure out either how to get rid of the surge, or make the input thresh hold higher than the surge. The problem with the latter, is that we also needed a way to get the sensor sensitive enough to reach that higher thresh hold. We spent a long time trying to figure out how to get rid of the surge, but we couldn't. We ended up turning the sensor around, adding a paper clip to the end of it, and increasing the thresh hold over the surge. That was was enabled the project to work. 

The ShotLight finally ended up working the day of the expo. It is a fully working project that will make many aspects of life much easier.

The ShotLight is a convenience tool used to control your light. Because of the standard 120 volt outlet that the ShotLight utilizes, you can plug any electrical home appliance with two states into the outlet box. The Main feature of the ShotLight is the large circular target engraved with a swirl, and the word "WHIRL" across the center. The ShotLight is meant to make your life easier. Simply touch the target, and your appliance should change states. For instance, if your light is on, it will turn off, and vice versa. Use the ShotLight when you are lying in bed, and don't want to get up to turn off your light, or simply use it for target practice.

The ShotLight in Action