I haven't done this specifically, but I'm working on an unrelated project and I was looking into using an infrared hand sweep sensor, maybe something like this:
![Image]()
They're cheap and fairly easy to find, the above one is listed under "Hand Sweep Wave Sensor Switch Module for 5V 12V 24V 72W Cabinet Lamp Wardrobe LED Lights" (they're named similar on eBay and AliExpress).
The problem is there doesn't seem to be any way to customize the way it works. That's fine for something like an LED candle where you just wave your hand once to turn it on, and wave it again to turn it off. But for my projects I want something which is more like a button press than an on/off switch, similar to a "wave your hand to open the door" sensor.
I suspect you'd want the same. I could probably work around it using an Arduino which can just read the input state and treat any change from on=>off or off=>on as a button press within the code, but I'll keep searching around to see if there's an alternative which better meets my needs.
Edit: It's also possible that an IR proximity sensor is better for you, it might not work for me but maybe that's another option. On some models you can even adjust the sensing distance, which might be handy if you want to differentiate between someone leaning over your "Donation Trap" and someone actually making a donation.
For example: https://wiki.dfrobot.com/Adjustable_Inf ... U_SEN0019_
They're cheap and fairly easy to find, the above one is listed under "Hand Sweep Wave Sensor Switch Module for 5V 12V 24V 72W Cabinet Lamp Wardrobe LED Lights" (they're named similar on eBay and AliExpress).
The problem is there doesn't seem to be any way to customize the way it works. That's fine for something like an LED candle where you just wave your hand once to turn it on, and wave it again to turn it off. But for my projects I want something which is more like a button press than an on/off switch, similar to a "wave your hand to open the door" sensor.
I suspect you'd want the same. I could probably work around it using an Arduino which can just read the input state and treat any change from on=>off or off=>on as a button press within the code, but I'll keep searching around to see if there's an alternative which better meets my needs.
Edit: It's also possible that an IR proximity sensor is better for you, it might not work for me but maybe that's another option. On some models you can even adjust the sensing distance, which might be handy if you want to differentiate between someone leaning over your "Donation Trap" and someone actually making a donation.
For example: https://wiki.dfrobot.com/Adjustable_Inf ... U_SEN0019_
Statistics: Posted by prodestrian — January 8th, 2025, 11:26 pm