During the interaction development course, we were introduced to the Arduino prototyping board and the Processing language. We got the assignment to just build something awesome with Arduino, which gave us great liberty but also a hard time finding a cool concept. As I had worked with Arduino before, I knew what its potential was and I and my team could start brainstorming instantly. Eventually we came to the idea to build a fire-breathing dragon.

 

Mushu, our dragon, was made with cardboard, egg boxes and ping-pong balls as eyes. For the fire breathing effect, I hacked an automatic air freshener and hooked the motor to the Arduino which was connected to a graphical interface with Processing. This way, we could activate the air freshener by the press of a button.  We place a tealight in Mushu’s mouth right in the spray radius of the air freshener, which resulted in a nice flame.  There were a few small extras; we installed red LEDs in his eyes which could be controlled through the interface. It was a small but extremely fun project to build the Super Awesome Fire Breathing Arduino Machine and I gained interest in Arduino and Processing along the way.