Compsculp Project: Poison (aka Drug Recalls); Partnered With "huughratdar"

This project utilizes lights, movement, and API to showcase the "poisonous" affect of legal drugs (not exactly their consumption but the risk of malpractice and side effects when firms are producing them). The project links the poison apple in Snow White to drugs while the hands showcase people's addiction to carelessly producing and/or consuming them. The background was meant to convey how entire communities are affected so it's supposed to be haunting, creepy, and dimly lit. Two people worked on the electronics so many of.the following things were done simultaneously.. We (jIsotos and huughratdar) hope you like it!

Particle argon

Prototype board

5V 4-phase stepper motor

20 Adafruit LED Strips (3 individual strips and 20 lights in total)

External power source (DC barrel jack adapter)

Wires

Cardboard

Chromebook

I searched up drug API and found the FDA Recall Enterprise System on OpenFDA which is used by the FDA to submit, update, classify, and terminate recalls. This API updates weekly, therefore, we are pulling class III (highest degree of a health hazard) drug classified recalls from one day (the fourth day/ Wednesday) of said week including over-the-counter and prescription drugs across the United States when FDA determines the correction of that marketed product/ drug. It's earliest data is from the 2004. At first, the API returned 5 pages or parts of code in the particle console so we isolated the total recall number of class III drug recalls. We did that by limiting the count of pages/parts to the first chunk in which the total recall number was and then parsed through the array from results to total.

With that number, we made 3 IF statements: In the first IF statement, if the recall number ranged from 1 to 500, the stepper motor would make 1 full turn. If the recall number ranged from 500 to 1000, the stepper motor would make 2 full turns and if the number was 1000 or more, the stepper motor would make 3 full turns. The stepper motor was wired up according to documentation and tested out before being connected to the prototype board.

The houses were already created prior to soldering the LED lights in so we soldered each strip, saw how it would fit in, soldered the next strip to it, and hot glued the wires so they curved inside the house. This process was repeated 3 times.

There is a for loop to make the LEDs turn red instead of writing 20 lines of code for it (knowing me, I would probably mess something up if I try to write all those lines) but this is not based on any API. The LEDs stay red as long as the power source. There is another for loop for a "light show" to add more colors and chaos to the eery look of the project.

We sketched out how the prototype board would look with the LED strip wires connected to the D2 pin of the argon, the stepper motor, and the external power supply as well as how everything would be wired on the bottom. The design included more pins to which we could connect our wires too, if needed.

We tested everything on our chromebook first and then tested and used the power supply.