ARTouch - A Smart Home Interface Made With Electric Paint
The students at the HTL Rennweg in Vienna, Austria, used Electric Paint to create a smart home switch as part of their thesis.
Because Electric Paint is so versatile, it lends itself to create various interfaces with it. This is exactly what the four students at the technical school HTL Rennweg did: for their final year project, they developed a smart home switch for which you can paint the interfaces with Electric Paint.
Inspired by previous wall installations done by our community, the students knew they wanted to do something on walls for their open-ended project. Researching the waste of unused heating and the economical loss, the team decided to tackle smart homes and invent a device that would make it easier for users to interact with their smart devices.
The students started off with an Arduino and a piece of wood as their prototype. Early findings were promising, so they moved on to developing a PCB with and ESP32 and then added Electric Paint as their interface. They used an ADC for filtering of the signals and transmitted information to the screens via I2C. The ESP32 then communicated with a Raspberry Pi via WiFi, which was in charge of controlling the units in their smart home, such as turning on the lightbulb via MQTT.
The project overall took one year to complete and was well received by the public of the school's open house. The students have for now continued with their further education but might come back to this project and embark on a start-up journey.
Images and Video: ARTouch
Do you want to create your own wireless switches with Electric Paint? Explore our Touch Board and check out our smart light switch tutorial!
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