Smudge

While I haven't shared about it much on this website, another one of my passions besides programming is creative writing. I write on occasion, usually just when I have a random idea, but sometimes I am prompted by a specific event. You can imagine my excitement when someone at my school announced a whole event based around creative writing, including a short story collection with the theme of aliens. Long story short, I managed to get far more involved in the event than I ever expected, including having a role in reviewing the submissions for the collection. All of the submissions were amazing, but one in particular caught my eye. In this story, the eponymous character Smudge is of an alien species that communicates through emotions instead of speech. The species also changes color depending on emotions. I found this idea intruiging, since I'm an introvert and sometimes I have trouble expressing my own emotions.

Thus, Smudge was born. I had a half day of school, a Circuit Playground Bluefruit, and an empty soap bottle. Instead of doing homework, I spent the afternoon researching libraries for detecting emotion from an image, and came across Human.js. A few hours and some hot glue later, I had a working robot that changes colors based on the emotion it detects. It's not pretty, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.