I designed the wall-mounted hanger for guitars with five hooks on TinkerCad 3D design.  That is for my husband who has so many guitars and boxes and tends to leave them on the floor or on the couch. This time, I designed electronic circuits to attach this wall hanger that will send an alert if he attempts to leave his room without hanging up his guitars on the hooks so that it can encourage him to organize his guitars well.

Here is how it works. The main power of this electronic circuits is connected to the light in his room and will be turned on if he turns off the light when he leaves his room. Each hook has a touch sensor and each sensor is connected to one of the slide switches on the Arduino. The slide switches are turned on if the touch sensors don’t sense objects (guitars) and are turned off once it senses the object touching. The five slide switches on the Arduino are connected to the red LED light and piezo speaker. If one or more than one slide switch is triggered, the red LED light is turned on and piezo speaker makes noise to send an alert. If all five slide switches are turned off, the LED light and piezo speaker don’t make a response anything. In other words, this module would send an alert with lights and noise if he leaves the room with his guitars on the floor or couch and will not stop the alerts until he hangs up each of the five guitars on the hooks.

Although my circuits just make a noise, I’d like to alert it to play his favorite song instead for the real product, in order to make his clean up more pleasant. I believe it’s innovative because this product is a tool that can function as a reminder and can also be customized for him.

First of all, I struggled with coming up the idea of how I can build circuits in the wall-mounted hanger which is a piece of totally analogue equipment.

Then, I came up with touch sensor idea, but I can’t find it on TinkerCad and I was stuck there for a while. Then William gave me great advice that I can use a slide switch instead as a touch sensor.

My biggest struggle was to connect 5 slide switches to control one LED and piezo speaker.

I wanted to make the LED light blink, however, I was not able to figure out how to connect the LED and 5 slide switches directly to the Arduino and update the codes. I still don’t know which inputs on Arduino I should use, especially when I connect multiple cables.

Considering the fact that I’ve never learned physics and didn’t know what a resistor is 3 weeks ago, I’m satisfied with this work. I’ve spent a lot of times on this,  even asked one of my friends to teach me the basic of physics. Finally, I made it!!

Most importantly, William at MakerHub helped me a lot. He was very patient with me and gave great advice. Thank you so much, William!!