Valentines2K11

Arduino-driven RGB LEDs with an IR proximity sensor and a tilt switch — a valentine that knows when you are near. The RGB lets it say anything a light can say; the proximity sensor lets it notice you arriving; the tilt switch lets it react to being picked up.

The build is the garden’s 2011 definition of a love letter: three channels of color, one sensor of presence, one sensor of being handled, and a program that turns all of it into a blush of light that changes when you come close.

It exists because flowers wilt, chocolates end, and a circuit that lights up when you walk in the room has no dignified way of playing it cool.

At the feast of Bride, when the year is exactly half-way from the dark, the old houses used to set a light in the window that was not for seeing by — it was for being seen by: a small fire saying I know you are out there, and I am keeping a place. And Diarmuid and Gráinne, fleeing half of Ireland with their torches held low, are remembered less for running well than for the stubbornness of keeping the light moving. This stone is the Athlone workshop’s 2011 addition to that tradition, and it was made the month of the feast of the same name: RGB for the blush, so the light could choose its color instead of the color being chosen for it; an eye of infrared so it would know when the beloved came near, and brighten like a face does; a tilt switch so that being picked up would be answered, because the old gifts never answered being held. It is the garden’s whole theology in twenty grams of Arduino: that a light is not for illumination, it is for noticing. Come near, says the circuit, in the only tongue it has. And near you come, and the light rises, and the moss on this stone is the green of that.