You know how you can feel when someone is looking at you? Thanks to a person detector, [Michael Rigsby’s] little robotic light switch also knows when you are looking at it. As you can see in the video below, when it notices you are looking at it, it lights up an LED. If you continue to gaze at it, it will turn to stare back at you. Keep staring it down and it will toggle the state of a remote control light switch.
This all works because of the person sensor module by Useful Sensors. The little module has a camera and face detection built into it. It doesn’t draw much power at 150 milliwatts. It can sense faces, including where they are and how many people are looking.
Once you have that data via I2C it is easy to program an Arduino or whatever to do what you want. In this case, an Uno, a servo motor, and some relays are all it takes. We might have made it interface with our smart home devices to turn on anything we want, but that would be an easy mod. The relays have the virtue of working with anything. For this project, he uses them to close switch contacts on a remote control.
You might think this is pointless, but look at all the Clappers that have been sold that do virtually the same thing in a much less elegant way. You can also use the sensor in reverse and make a robot or a clock that is bashful.
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